There is more to innovation than "idea management"

I have been working on creating tools and methodologies for enterprise collaboration for the past 20 years. The last 5 years were devoted to building idea management platforms and developing effective community management techniques. Idea Management, even according to Gartner, is old news and yet every vendor in this space (except Social Lair) has really not come up with a broader support for what comes before and after idea management.
At Social Lair, we are taking a more holistic view of innovation. Innovation is an iterative process consisting of four steps: Listen - Analyze - Engage - Act. The Social Lair platform is designed to support all four steps.

Listen - The first step is simply to listen to conversations among consumers, employees, and partners. You can do some passive listening by simply monitoring social media conversations. There are two modes of social media listening. You can either configure your social media monitoring module to listen to domain conversations or you can listen with the specific goal of doing competitive analysis and focus only on posts that explicitly mention your brand or your competitors. You can also do some inside-the-wall listening by creating customer communities that allow them to show off the way they use your product or customer service experiences by posting on your community wall.
Analyze - Once you have found a way of effectively listening to all those conversations, you can derive a lot of good insights if you have the right tool at your disposal. At Social Lair, we combine text analytics, sentiment analysis, and social network analysis to identify:

• Competitive strengths and weaknesses
• Conversational themes
• Unmet needs and pain points
• Trouble spots around performance metrics

Engage - The third step involves more active engagement with lead users, employees in the field, and close partners. In this step, you can create communities of different styles. Some may invite lead users to share open ended suggestions about product improvements and ask for predictions and preferences. Some communities may focus on active co-creation and ideation around company-defined theme based on the learning derived from the analysis done in second phase.
Act - This last step is off course what makes everything worth the time and energy spent in the first three steps. In the brave new world of open innovation and collaboration, there is more to the "Act" phase then creating a stealth project for your R&D team. This phase has a lot of room for involving your community (perhaps not quite as large in the listening phase) in provide continuous feedback so that you fail fast and maximize the probability of success.

Social Innovation Patterns - Part 1

"Social Innovation" is a bottom-up process in which ideas originate from the fringes of your organization, good ideas bubble up to the top, and ultimately get transformed into improved product, services, and processes for your business. When I first started interacting with customers five years ago, we had to introduce and educate majority of our prospects on this way of managing innovation. Today we have crossed the chasm and this practice has become mainstream. In spite of this, vendors in this space have not done much to make it easy for businesses to create the most appropriate social innovation solution that fits the needs and culture of their organization. There are dozens of vendors that offer their own brand of one-size-fits-all solution. On the other hand, there are a few vendors that offer more flexibility but creating the right kind of solution remains an art form and takes several iterations to build. With this series of blog post, I intend to create a framework for exploring different dimensions of such solution and ultimately select one with minimal effort.

I classify social innovation efforts along the following three main dimensions:

• Target community - What kind of users are being requested to submit ideas: employees or company outsiders.
• Privacy Requirements - Can the submitters view and collaborate on ideas posted by others? 
• Duration - Are you running a time-bound campaign or trying to create an ongoing community for continuous innovation

There are off course numerous variations within these dimensions but a combination of these three produce eight very common use cases as shown in the following table.

Ideator Community	Target Ideators	Private Submissions	Duration
Employee Suggestion Box	Internal	Yes	Ongoing
Employee Ideation Drive	Internal	Yes	Time Bound
Open Innovation	External	Yes	Ongoing
Open Ideation Drive	External	Yes	Time Bound
Employee Innovation Program	Internal	No	Ongoing
Idea Campaign	Internal	No	Time Bound
Co-Creation Community	External	No	Ongoing
Open Challenge	External	No	Time Bound

In this series of blog post I will explore each of these patterns in more detail.

Ten tips on becoming a successful business leader

CEOs and their golden parachutes have become a staple news in the last few years. There is that Yahoo musical chairs and the HP fiasco just to mention a few newsworthy items. And who can resist the urge to be inspired from all those government officials spending enormous amounts of tax payer's money? After being bombarded with news about these "successful" leaders and having learned from the best in my own professional career, I thought it was time for me to write one of those "Ten things you absolutely must do to woo the love of your life" style articles. So here it goes...

Demonstrate incompetency in doing real work - If you learn anything from this article, this is the one that you must really grasp. People who do real work may climb the ladder to fix a light bulb, but they never climb the one that makes you truly successful. You must actively demonstrate your inability to perform even the routine work items. That way everything gets delegated to the real workers and you have plenty of time to manage others and focus on your own career advancement.

Lying is just stretching the truth - If you think that tiger in the cereal commercial really exists, you might as well give up and try to become a mathematician or something. It's all about advertising and here in the US we are really good at it. You must learn to successfully stretch the truth about your resume (so what if you didn't really have that degree in metallurgical engineering?), the size of the company, the revenue, etc. That's the only way of getting to the next and even bigger level of stretching the truth.

Control the information flow - All communication between the lower and higher levels in your organization must go through you. That way you can convince the people that work for you how every bad decision was made by the superiors and tell your superiors how every failure was the fault of XYZ working for you and that s/he needs to be fired.

Align yourself with success - Many people believe in this myth that the success has to be "earned". They clearly haven't seen the Staples "Easy Button" ad. You have to be smart enough to judge what's getting successful and what's failing. When you see something failing, get hold of the smartest person who works for you and tell him (in private) how s/he is the only one who can save the situation. If something is on track to becoming successful, jump on it with both your feet and widely publicize how you are the key driving force behind it.

Keep up the appearances - Always remember that it is all about the "image" and perception is reality. No one really cares if you understand the business. That's such an ancient idea. Everyone is hoping that you will follow my tips listed earlier in this blog and con a bigger fish so that they can get a few more pennies in their pocket.

PS: I did originally set out to write 10 tips on becoming a successful business leader. Unfortunately I do have to get back and do some real work. But some times less is better. Good luck with your careers and do mention this blog post in your television interview after you get indicted by SEC.

Nabh's Hierarchy of Gamification Techniques

Gamification has been in the news lately and most of it revolves around making user perform certain activities in exchange for some type of reward. While this is useful, gamification can be applied to produce a lot more business value than motivating users to perform simplistic activities. This blog post looks beyond activity-based rewards and identifies other forms of gamification that provide far better value; especially when used as part of enterprise social strategy.

Gamification is the application of game design principles to non-game applications to motivate users in accomplishing real life tasks. At its core, gamification is about creating a fun, engaging experience that encourages users to perform tasks that they might otherwise find tedious or common place.We have identified four different approaches to gamification as depicted in the following figure.

Activity-Based Rewards

This is the simplest form of gamifying user experience. This approach works very well when the objective is to simply maximize the amount of user activity. Examples include boosting the number of “Likes” on your facebook property, sharing a link to your site with friends, etc.

Rewards on Validation

Sometimes it is not enough to know that a user has completed an activity, but that the use has completed it successfully. For example activity-based points can be awarded when a user completes a training course, but you probably want validation from the system that the user has passed the training course successfully. In fact one could also award points in proportion to user’s score in the training course. This is obviously harder to implement since it integration with external systems but it also introduces more accountability by requiring validation that the user has completed a task satisfactorily.

Emergent Gamification Metrics

Awarding points and badges after validation is better than pure activity based rewards but it still a simplistic approach to gamification. As the novelty of completing tasks and getting badges wears off, these techniques cannot be used to incentivize users in the long run. A more sophisticated form of creating user leaderboard ranking is to analyze the individual’s contributions to a community and examine how the community as a whole is reacting to the individual contributions. Reputation or connector rankings produced based on social network analysis is one example of this type of gamification. Typically the rankings and points earned in the manner are based on a recursive analysis of the community interactions and are bound by a time window. This makes it much harder to game, incentivizes users to continue provide meaningful input, and is a much better form of motivation since it is a form of peer recognition.

Turning Play into Work

Serious games help organizations solve complex problems through collaborative play. This is clearly a technique that requires different designs to address different business objectives and cannot be generically applied to an enterprise social community. This is however the best form of gamification since the players create business value by playing the game itself. Idea markets like the once I developed and deployed in Cisco's I-Prize competition is a great example of this. Players collectively provide a much better ranking of ideas by investing virtual money in the ones they believe would succeed. A product design game created by Social Lair is another example. This game requires players to design products by balancing benefits, price, costs, and risks. The resulting mix of features are much better indication of what should go into the product as compared to the tradition method that pits competing factions that only look at the upside.

Enterprise social is less about "social" and more about collaborative problem solving

The Social Lair team had a fairly busy two days at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. A lot of work went into the preparation for the conference. It also required a lot of energy to keep up with the visitors in our booth and discuss our approach and the solution stack with them. So I want to first thank our team that made it successful.

I have been preaching the "un-socialness" of enterprise social software for some time now and the message was validated by the majority of people that I met at the conference. When you think about Enterprise Social  Software, you think about socializing the way people do on Facebook, only this time it is inside an organization. People tend to forget a key difference between enterprise social and consumer social. Facebook or Farmville do not care how you spend your time on their platform/app as long as you spend enough of it and help pull your friends in the conversations so that their reach continues to expand. In the enterprise world, we primarily care about "quality" of conversations not really its volume.

At Social Lair, we are building a platform that enables organizations to "collaborate" not just "socialize". We have created a platform that facilitates solving business problems and making better decisions by leveraging the wisdom of crowds; unlike many other players in this area that just pay lip service, we really do it. Our analytics and gamification engine helps significantly reduce the cost of social transactions. The conversational constructs embedded in user's activity stream provide quantitative aggregation that can be used for predictions, preference ranking, resource allocation, etc.

Overall we had a very positive reaction to our overall message. A lot of people were complaining about how noisy some of the other platform are and the challenges encountered in making them sticky. Most people liked the term "Collective Business Intelligence" platform. We found some like-minded partners that will soon join our ecosystem.

Enterprise social tools must help people collaborate not just communicate

I recently came across a post by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman titled "Facebook no match for old-style politics". The story begins with an incident related to Egyptian elections. The election choice is between Mohamed Morsai, the candidate of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and Ahmed Shafik, a retired general who also served as Hosni Mubarak's last prime minister. The article talks about how the inner workings of the society hasn't really changed even though information sharing via Twitter and Facebook may have been responsible for the democratic revolution. He goes on to mention a comment from an egyptian friend "Facebook really helped people to communicate, but not collaborate". That's exactly how I feel about may of today's enterprise Social platforms.

We have been dealing with the information explosion problem for over a decade and many of today's enterprise social tools are making it worse by throwing even more information in users' activity stream. I have talked to many enterprise users and they have invariably complained about how noisy these systems become and how he/she has stopped using it.

At Social Lair, we have a fundamentally different outlook towards building an enterprise social platform. Socializing without purpose cannot give organizations the ROI they need from these systems. We certainly support information sharing, but we have created several conversational constructs that promote purposeful interactions. Our primary goal is to allow our users to get their work done faster, better, and cheaper by leveraging the energy of their co-workers, partners, and customers. For us, sharing is just the tip of the iceberg; we "socialize" many other business functions including innovation, forecasting, coordination, and strategy management.

Introducing Social Lair

In my last blog post, I described some of the lessons I have learned in creating and deploying social innovation communities. I have created a new platform that builds upon the lessons learned for our new company Social Lair (http://sociallair.com). In this blog post I want to outline the solution strategy adopted by Social Lair that really "puts social to work".

Getting work done is at the core of all our offerings. A good enterprise social platform will get the work done faster, better, and cheaper by  reaping the benefits of collective wisdom of crowds. We believe that every business process, from innovation and idea management to HR, Product Management, can benefit from becoming more open and democratic. In fact, the enterprise social software will become mission-critical only when we achieve this goal.

At the conceptual level, our solution can be viewed in terms of three main layers (depicted in the figure below):

• Blended Social Analytics - Analytics is the core foundation of our solution stack and consists of Information Network Analysis (reputations, connector rating, conversational levels), Natural Language Processing (purpose-based routing, expert identification), Quantitative Aggregation Models (prediction markets, rank aggregation), and Gamification (currency management). Analytics piece is instrumental in optimizing cost of social transactions and adding relevance to search and ranking.
• Purposeful Conversations – We model community interactions as a series of structured conversations focused on a business purpose (market forecasting, choice resolution, ideation, etc). Each conversation type has an unstructured component, a quantitative component, and an aggregation and analytics engine for providing actionable intelligence to the conversation sponsor.
• Community Archetypes – Based on our past experience, we have realized that different business contexts require different styles of community design. For example, Idea campaign communities would just not work effectively for daily collaboration.  At the same time, we did not want to create a system that is TOO flexible and requires greater knowledge and effort for set up and configuration. Our approach is to capture well-established collaboration patterns in the form of community archetype. Each archetype is defined in terms of the included conversation types, navigational scheme, terminology, and access control.

Our strategy in realizing this vision is to create minimalistic experience that reflects our approach and iterate on it based on the feedback received by our end users. We are already having some interesting conversations with end users in this space who are getting quite excited about the potential of our technology. I will off course keep you updated in the new venture as we continue our journey in this space.