idea challenge

From top-down challenges to the Grassroots myth

February 23, 2011 by Jurjan Huisman | 1 Comment

Today I did a quick scan through my RSS reader and the title of an older blogpost by Michael Idinopulos caught my attention: ‘The Grassroots Myth‘. Since we perform community management activities on a daily basis and develop social software for the enterprise, terms like “Grassroots” and “Bottom-up innovation” in blog titles attract me to read further. In his post Idinopulos goes against the notion that the most effective way to bring a new social software platform into an enterprise is through a bottom-up approach. He calls it the Grassroots Myth. I only partially agree with the blogpost and would therefore like to add a critical element: time.

The Grassroots Myth

The main reason behind the Grassroots Myth lies in the technology aspect. Besides a few success stories, it is generally really difficult to source a new technology, platform, tool or application via the grassroots approach. For a full explanation on the myth, definitely read the full blogpost. It’s well worth the read. However, I think that the proposed solution in the end is a little too simple. In the blogpost it is stated that “…the most effective way to empower Content Grassroots activity is to provide a single, unified, integrated technology. Then invite everyone in…” Specifically the last bit, I think, oversimplifies reality, because in practice it’s not a matter of “inviting everyone in”. When you just set up a platform and invite everybody in, there is a big chance that you get a load of people to log in, have a look around and never come back. There are a couple of crucial steps needed upfront to make people come back and really participate. Specifically in an innovation community this is the case. But before I’ll mention a couple of these crucial steps, I would like to add another dimension to the equation: time.

The road to community success
Personally, I think that the most interesting innovation communities are the ones where grassroots initiatives happen; “Content Grassroots” as Idinopulos calls it. However, it takes time to get there. From experience with clients we have learned that the best route to a successful enterprise community is the following:

Route to success

First start with a challenge, which is a top-down initiative where you tap into the collective brainpower of a group of people. This can either be an idea challenge, a problem solving challenge or a knowledge challenge. The aim of an idea challenge is to capture ideas from a group of people and let them enrich and collaborate upon these ideas. A problem solving challenge is used to get solutions to a specific problem. The last challenge type can be utilised to capture knowledge and experience around a specific topic. Key is that the topic, for either type of challenge, is derived from a strategic innovation domain and the importance of the challenge is literally shown by senior management support and involvement. After the first challenge is launched, you can run a second one, and another one, etc. Since people are sharing knowledge, experience, ideas and interact with each other, a community forms. Over time the participants see the value of the collective brainpower and actual Content Grassroots activities start to take place.

Successfully starting an online community
Like I said before, it’s not simply a matter of setting up the technology and inviting everybody in. In different client projects we’ve learned that a couple of things are important when successfully starting challenges and growing towards an online community. These include:

  • perform a social network analysis
  • start with a pilot group
  • organise offline events
  • organise for visible senior management involvement
  • use thematic challenges

Perform a social network analysis
Before you start to roll-out a social software platform, you should do an analysis who the linking pins are in your organisation. Because, in a network organisation the success of individuals and the team-success is not so much dependent on reporting structures, but on who you know. So definitely try to leverage the network of the linking pins in your organisation by attracting these people for your pilot group.

Launch with a pilot group
Before you invite everyone in, start with a pilot group. This group of people knows upfront that they will start on an (almost) empty platform and help kick-start the initiative. If you invite everyone in from the start, they will come to a platform with almost no content. No matter how nice your platform looks, it will most likely be the last time they’ve visited it, because the value needs to come from the content. So don’t invite the whole company in right at the start.

Organise offline events
After your social software platform has launched, it is generally a good idea to organise offline events, because at these offline meet-ups people get in contact with others on a different level than online. Simple things like mutual hobbies or interests can lay the basis for a first contact. Another benefit of offline meetings is trust, which is far more easy to generate offline than online. In the end, the barriers to react online upon each other are a lot lower afterwards and therefore offline events stimulate online interaction and activities after the event.

Organise for visible senior management involvement
At different enterprise communities we have seen that involvement from senior management is very important for the participation rate; a critical success factor of a community. When employees see and realise that senior management value their contributions in the online community it raises the level and quality of their participation.

Use thematic challenges
To maximize participation in a challenge it is essential that a significant amount of time, effort and thought is taken to ensure both the correct topic is defined and within this topic the correct generative question is created. By keeping the topic tightly focussed it is easier to be clear upfront about the anticipated outcomes and therefore the success factors of the challenge.

Use thematic challenges
To maximize participation in a challenge it is essential that a significant amount of time, effort and thought is taken to ensure both the correct topic is defined and within this topic the correct generative question is created. By keeping the topic tightly focussed it is easier to be clear upfront about the anticipated outcomes and therefore the success factors of the challenge.

So I agree with Idinopulos that in large corporations a grassroots introduction of the technology is generally not the way forward. I think that the road to a successful community starts with a ‘top-down’ challenge. In the next step more challenges can be started to organically grow into a community where grassroots activities start to take place. The challenges are simply needed to supply the initial vibrancy on the platform. If the challenges prove to be valuable, participants will start to realise the potential of such a platform and start to utilise it for activities not scoped by challenges. The five activities I mentioned above are critical in this process. Have you experienced other activities that ensure a successful introduction of social enterprise software?

Tagged ,

Epic cycling tours and crowdsourcing

March 25, 2010 by Jaap Linssen | 3 Comments

Screen shot 2010-03-25 at 2.49.28 PMThrough Springwise I ran into an initiative of Tour d’Afrique Ltd. a Toronto based company named for its flagship cycling tour that annually traverses the African continent from Cairo to Cape Town. They have started to crowdsource cycling tours through an operation they call Dream Tours.

The text on their homepage: “Do you have a dream expedition on a bike that you would like to have others to join you on, help you get it off the ground and share the costs? Do you have a dream tour that you wish someone would help you implement it? DreamTours will revolutionize the way cycling tours around the world are created. You create your DreamTour and the community around the world makes it a reality.”

Crowdsourcing is hot, however getting it to work for you is not easy. I believe this initiative is aligned well to be successful. I’ll discuss a number of prerequisites for successful crowdsourcing and community management.

The community is passionate

These guys organise life experience cycle tours. They started with Cairo to Cape Town tour. A trip of 12.000 km in 120 days. They now have 5 of such epic journeys in their program. The people participating in such events have to be passionate. If you ask people with passion to come up with their dream, you’re bound to get interesting input. Currently there are 25 proposed tours.

The community is focussed but there is enough room for creativity

A very difficult aspect to deal with when you engage the crowd is to give them enough focus without destroying creativity. A mistake many companies make when asking the crowd for input is that they formulate the question/challenge broadly to get as many diverse ideas as possible. Such lack of focus is often detrimental for the quality of ideas. You get too many irrelevant ideas. The low quality will scare people away as they are not willing to invest energy into something of such poor quality. Furthermore, in such cases you also see the organisation itself lose interest and the initiative dies. So you need to apply focus. The level of focus correlates with the passion the community has for the subject. The more passion, the more you can apply focus. I believe Dream Tours has found the right balance. The only thing people are asked to do is plot a trip or in other words their dream. The planning and organisation is done by Dream Tours if the route gets enough buy in from the community.

What’s in it for me?

One of the key aspects in having a lively community is answering the “What’s in it for me?” question for the people you would like to contribute. If it isn’t clear how people can benefit from contributing, they will not. The benefit can be as straight forward as prize money or more intangible like feeling good about yourself. “What’s in it for me?” also correlates with the passion of the community; talking about something you love is very satisfying to most people. Not sufficiently addressing this subject is the number one reason for failing communities.

In this case, the answer to the ‘What’s in it for me?’ question is very clear. You get to plan and share your dream journey. If your journey is selected and enough people sign in, you have the option to ride for free or share this prize with the others as a group discount.

How can the Dream Tours community improve?

A powerful way to improve the quality of ideas generated by the community or spin of new ideas is what we call ‘enrichment’. Others enrich ideas that were posted previously. In our practice we usually witness that the true brakethrough comes from insights other people add to the ideas. For Dream Tours, I imagined that people would go crazy enriching the tours proposed by others. Enrichments such as special sites to visit, special mountains to climb, etc. There is no real enrichment activity on Dream Tours. I would suggest Dream Tours to start inviting their members to enrich each others tours. And why stop there? Why don’t they also put their own tours in the community for others to be enriched?

Tagged , , ,

Open Innovation at Crowdspring

December 23, 2009 by Jurjan Huisman | 1 Comment

In a true entrepreneurial spirit, quite a number of employees at Innovation Factory have their own side projects which they work on in the weekends and evenings. For one of those projects, Green at Work (in which I participate), a logo needed to be designed. It was done through Crowdspring, a crowd-sourcing platform. Even the seemingly simple process of having a logo designed by a crowd has many aspects of open innovation to it. I would like to share the experience with you and place it in the context of idea management.

Crowdspring

Clear question
First of all, the logo design contest was initiated on Crowdspring.com with a preset running time of two weeks. To start a contest, Crowdspring has a submission form to describe your briefing. Their template takes you through a number of steps: You need to supply background information, what you need, who your target audience is, what kind of designs you like, and things you absolutely do or don’t want to have in your design. Before we started we observed that good briefings at other contests resulted in higher quality contributions so we took our time to write a good briefing.

Good feedback
It is vital to give supportive feedback to the people that contribute to your challenge. This feedback results in a higher quantity and quality of new submissions. This stems from the fact that people enrich each other’s designs based upon your feedback. Imagine one specific designer submits a design at Crowdspring and gets feedback from you that a specific element is really cool but another element definitely needs to be changed. If this happens a couple of times with different designs, new entrants will be better directed towards the type of design that you like. So in the end, people build upon each other’s submissions to come to higher quality submissions. In the end we received 197 design submissions of which the quality kept improving during the process.

Scout the community for input
You should scout through the profiles of the community members to find people you think can make a good contribution. We did this soon after we started our design challenge. We went through other design challenges and looked for designs that we liked and sent messages to the designers to tell them we liked their previous designs and asked them to participate in our challenge. Our eventual winner was someone we found in this way.

Diversity boosts creativity
Another great aspect of a community like Crowdspring is the fact that it’s members come from all over the world and have different backgrounds. Sure, they all do something with design, but compared to one specific design agency it’s a very diverse group. The resulting creative contributions are absolutely amazing. We selected the following design from a Japanese designer named Kiona:

Green_at_Work

Self-regulation within the community
At a certain point in the contest, one Crowdspring member even sent us a message that he found a similarity in one of the design submissions. He noticed that one of the submissions in our contest was a slightly altered copy of a submission from a different designer at a previous project. Obviously, copying is a complete no-go in a design process. So the community even helps to keep the contest ‘clean’. This is something that is hardly do-able without those extra hundreds pairs of eyes.

Idea management
In general, when you ask a community a question you leverage the principle: nobody is as smart as everybody. Specifically when you involve a diverse group. But when an organisation sets up idea management one should realise that resources should be made available to coordinate the process. In a previous blogpost “Implementing Idea Management” we concluded that implementing effective idea management is about asking the right people the right questions. A significant amount of time should be spent getting the questions right. While supplying feedback to idea generators can improve the quality of a specific idea and motivates them to keep submitting ideas that constantly increase in quality. This feedback and motivation is part of community management, a crucial element within idea management.

An idea challenge normally runs for a specific amount of time (compared to open ended idea management) and is focussed around a specific subject.

Crowd-sourced design process in the context of idea management
Because of our experience at Innovation Factory with idea challenges we could see the potential upfront to leverage a community like Crowdspring where the diverse background of its members contributes to a very creative logo. I find it really interesting to see that the above mentioned crowd-sourced design process has a lot of similarities with an idea challenge:

  1. Clear question. It is very important to state a well thought out briefing as this gives direction. At an idea challenge the way you formulate your question is identically crucial. Also a set timing of two weeks helps the “sense of urgency” of contributors to submit a design quickly rather than postponing it. Idea challenges also run best for a set time.
  2. Good feedback. From our experience with idea challenges we know that it is absolutely vital to give constructive and fast feedback. As a result you get more and higher quality contributions.
  3. Scout the community for input. Part of the community management activities we perform at idea challenges consists of looking through member profiles to see if their experience and knowledge matches a specific idea. We then contact those people to ask if they can contribute to the idea. This proactive moderation activity was exactly what we did at the Crowdspring design contest as well by searching for designers that we thought could make a good contribution.
  4. Diversity boosts creativity. In general diversity helps to boost creativity. In that respect internet tools help to lower the barrier significantly to attract a broad public. This holds both for idea management software but also for the Crowdspring website.
  5. Self-regulation within the community. The self-regulation we saw at the logo design process, also happens in another form at idea challenges. People place corrective comments on ‘bad’ ideas and the community also acts as a first filter on which ideas are good and which are not. This is done by letting people vote ideas up or down and the commenting.

In the end it means that you definitely need to make time available to coordinate the whole process. It takes a lot of time to support the community in the right way, but you will probably be positively surprised by the good results you will get with open innovation.

Tagged , , ,

PICNIC ‘08

September 27, 2008 by Gyuri van de Bilt | No Comments

My friday at PICNIC ’08 started at the workshop ‘The Power of Co-Creation’ by Albert Boswijk (European Centre for the Experience Economy) and Raul Lansink (Favela Fabric). The workshop was actually partially co-created by the attendees: everyone shared their questions on co-creation and examples of co-creation. These drove the discussion and any unanswered questions will be sent to all attendees in the near future. Besides the classical Lego, Fiat and other examples also other initiatives were mentioned by the audience. Amongst them the Amsterdam Balloon Party where guests dress-up and do mini-performances themselves on a specific theme. One of the attendees mentioned the launch of an Ikea initiative (‘Rip Ikea’) to stimulate users to go freestyle with their furniture parts and thus create new objects. We saw this on the recent Hacking Ikea design event, but she may have implied a further roll-out of this concept.
Raul pointed out that co-creation is suited for small incremental innovations and no “big bang” ideas are to be expected. He also stated that it is all about a ‘contract’ between an organisation and their co-creators, where the organisation promises to listen and act/deliver upon the outcome of the proces. Managing and living up to user expectations as well as the willingness to experience the yet unknown outcome, are the actual key factors to successful co-creation.

Read More

Tagged , , ,

I-Prize: open innovation at Cisco

July 21, 2008 by Jurjan Huisman | No Comments

Cisco’s I-Prize is a good example of an open innovation project. On Fastforwardblog.com a nice description of the I-Prize project is given.

The process of the I-Prize project is well-defined and I think that is one of the main reasons why it is a success. For example the clear communication on how ideas are taken to the next level is a strong point. Contestants know exactly what the next step will be if their idea is good enough to make it to the ‘next round’. So it is not simply an online idea suggestion box where all ideas end up on a big pile. The idea management process is clearly formulated and communicated. The result is that incomming ideas are generally well-formulated and people submitting their ideas will not get frustrated about an unclear process. When people can clearly see what happens with their ideas, they will be happy to contribute again the next time.

Read more about the discussion of Cisco’s I-Prize on Fastforwardblog.com.

Tagged , ,

Innovation at Procter & Gamble

June 5, 2008 by Jurjan Huisman | No Comments

The New York Times blog has posted an interesting interview with A. G. Lafley on innovation at Procter & Gamble (registration free but required). The interview is well-worth a read.

I particularly like his answer on the question “…and yet only half of your product innovations succeed. Why isn’t the rate higher?” Lafley states “I don’t really want it to be. Human nature is such that, if we push our people to drive the batting average up, they’ll try to hit more safely, take a shorter swing, go for the singles instead of home runs. But we try to set milestones that innovations must meet at every step along the development process. As soon as they miss one, we allocate the resources to another product moving through the funnel. That’s another difference from the old days, when P. & G. let bad ideas go too far.”

Read More

Tagged , ,

Open Innovation

May 16, 2008 by Ebbe Nieuweboer | 2 Comments

Open Innovation propagates sharing and collaboration with external parties. The architect of the term Open Innovation, Henry Chesbrough, describes the following principles as being at the foundation of Open Innovation

  • Not all smart people work in-house – need to tap into external knowledge
  • External R&D can generate significant value to us
  • Research does not need to originate from our internal work to be profitable for us
  • A strong business model is more important than first to market
  • Internal as well as external ideas are essential to win
  • We can capitalise on our own Intellectual Property (IP) and we should buy others’ IP when needed

While the term was initially very much related to IP, it has evolved; A recent valuable resource of literature on open innovation has been composed by VINNOVA, the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems. It has been made available on openinnovation.nl

In practice, there are many shapes in which Open Innovation can be manifested. So how about some examples?

Read More

Tagged , , , , , , , ,