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Fail and learn to innovate

April 27, 2010 by Jurjan Huisman | 1 Comment

In a recent blog post on the Innovate on Purpose blog, the author Jeffrey Philips borrows a famous quote from Winston Churchill and bends it towards the field of Innovation: “Innovation success is based on going from “failure” to “failure” without a loss of enthusiasm.” In a lot of companies he writes, the fear of failing inevitably creeps in. This is very true. Personally, I think this stems from the fact that people responsible for a project/idea more or less connect their career to the project. From experience with different innovation projects I would suggest to take a step back and let ideas roam through the company to evolve more. At Innovation Factory we like to see ideas as a seed.

Most often ideas need some attention and enrichments from others to grow to a more mature state before a good decision can be made whether an idea should be picked up to start a project. Hence the seed metaphor; a seed also needs some attention and enrichment (water) to grow. The nice thing about the upcoming social software tools (Enterprise2.0 software) is that they suit this approach very well. First of all with tools like idea management software it is very easy for employees, and possibly suppliers and clients as well, to contribute ideas. But the real difference stems from the fact that you can use the collective brainpower to enrich (or grow) these ideas. A third interesting aspect of these type of tools is the fact that ideas (and their enrichments) get stored online. So far my story about software tools, because as the name implies they are merely the tools to become more innovative; It’s all about the way you use these tools whether your company will be successful at innovating.

To come back to the failure aspect, another quote in this context is very apt. It is a quote from Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, directed to his employees: “I hope you fail often and I hope you fail fast”. As I described before, Google is a very innovative company. What Schmidt implies with his statement is that he wants Google employees to try out a lot of new ideas. In his quote the company culture is pronounced that it doesn’t matter if you make mistakes or formulate an idea that won’t make it. It is part of the process to come to new successful products or services as long as you learn from the mistakes and failures. The more you fail, the more you learn; while the faster you fail, fewer costs are made to learn. This learning from failures and discovering rapidly whether an idea is worth an investment in time and money to develop further is very well supported by social tools like idea management software. Like stated before, all the failures (ideas that won’t make it now) are stored online. So others that come up with the same idea at a later stage won’t have to spend time and money to do research for that idea. While over time, the market might have changed or new technologies might have come available and an idea that was rejected before might be great to develop now.

Probably the most crucial aspect in the above described situation is creating a company culture where failure is not punished but stimulated. A CEO stating that exact message is a very important drive for a company to become more innovative.

Tagged Culture, Enterprise 2.0, idea management

Epic cycling tours and crowdsourcing

March 25, 2010 by Jaap Linssen | 3 Comments

Screen shot 2010-03-25 at 2.49.28 PM Through 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 Community management, crowdsourcing, idea challenge, idea management

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:

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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Community, Community management, idea challenge, idea management

Internal or External Idea Management

November 2, 2009 by Jaap Linssen | No Comments

groene eenden Our intern Jan Martijn Everts mentioned a piece of interesting research to me that I would like to share with you.

Poetz and Schreir (2009) present “the first real world comparison of ideas actually generated by a firm’s professionals with those generated by users in the course of an idea generation contest.” Their findings are interesting:
1- Ideas created by professionals score significantly lower in terms of novelty than ideas created by users.
2- Professional ideas are attributed lower customer benefit compared to other ideas.
3- Ideas created by professionals tend to be easier to realize.

Kristensson, Gustafsson and Archer (2004, p. 11) provide the first laboratory-based insights that “professional developers elaborated with informational elements that were not as cognitively remote,“ whereas users seemed to have “access to informational elements that were further apart“. Users are thus able to come up with more novel solutions.

In short: If you want to come up with new and customer beneficial ideas it is good practice to involve diverse people with considerable distance to the company processes.

Get the paper.

Tagged idea, idea management, innovatio, Innovation, open, Open Innovation

Implementing Idea Management

April 7, 2009 by Jaap Linssen | 1 Comment

This article describes the main reason idea management projects tend to underperfom. It then provides an insight into a proven 4 step methodology for successfully implementing idea management.

Why Idea Management systems underperform
Although idea management systems are seen as a crucial driver for large organisations to become more innovative, they have to be seen as a tool supporting ‘a more widespread organisational change. These systems need to support a process and an organisation, not the other way around. There are scores of cases of companies that buy and deploy a system without the required consideration given to what needs to be in place for such a system to deliver its full value.

In our practice we most often see idea management systems being deployed with a lack of focus. The organisation has not scoped the problem(s) they want to be solved and identified the people that should participate in solving them. If you open up the system to a large group of people without a clear question many employees will enter the ideas they have been walking around with and couldn’t sell. This creates a tsunami of poor ideas overwhelming management that cannot evaluate properly because they do not have the capacity to do so. Because the quality of the ideas is low management will not increase resources to evaluate the ideas. This results in neither being able to evaluate ideas properly, give feedback to employees, nor find the good ideas. The lack of feedback leads to disgruntled employees who feel the organisation is not taking them and their ideas seriously. The lack of good ideas lead to disgruntled senior management that feels they are wasting budget. On average such implementations do not last very long.

This wouldn’t be such an issue if you could stop, rethink and try again. However, you have just lost your employees trust. The organisation will need years to forget that, in their eyes, their ideas have gone to waste.

Gary Hamel wrote the following analogy to playing Golf in an article called Innovation Hacker:

Tagged Culture, idea management, Innovation

Venture capitalists understand innovation principles

October 23, 2008 by Jurjan Huisman | No Comments

A little while ago I read a book called “The future of management” by Gary Hamel. Besides the fact that it is a great book full of nice metaphors and examples for management issues, I liked Hamel’s opinion on venture capitalists in relation to innovation:

“Innovation follows a power law: for every 1,000 oddball ideas, only 100 will be worth experimenting with; out of those, no more than 10 will merit a significant investment, and only two or three will ultimately produce a bonanza. Venture capitalists understand this arithmetic. In a given year, a typical VC firm will review thousands of business plans, meet with hundreds of would-be entrepreneurs, invest in a dozen or so companies, and then hope that one or two of them will become the next Google, Cisco, or Amgen. Few managers, though, seem eager to acknowledge the inescapable arithmetic of innovation.”

Innovation Funnel
This actually means that venture capitalists understand how to utilise the innovation funnel. In a structured innovation process, a lot of ideas need to go into the innovation funnel and along the different stages of the funnel the quantity of ideas goes down and the quality of the ideas goes up. In this way, the innovation funnel provides organisations with a staged process for innovation. To use the same amount of ideas that Hamel mentioned: out of the 1000 ideas that are brought in, the 100 best ideas are selected and get a little time and funding to be developed a little further; at the next stage, these 100 ideas are rated at stricter criteria so that the best 10 ideas will go into the following stage. At the end the one or two best ideas will be developed into actual products or services and all the other ideas and knowledge gathered along the process are stored. In any case it is important not to bet on one horse from the start. Diversification of the ideas is needed. As Hamel puts it:

Tagged idea management, Innovation, Innovation funnel