A lot of what I heard during the conference is common wisdom shared by the community. For example many speakers emphasized the need to have top down support, a continual communication strategy, obstacles created by the nay sayers, etc. I was on a panel that discussed such best practices along with Jon Bidwell (Chubb), Kevin Paylow (Halliburton), and Steve Fenessey (InnoCentive). I did have a few surprises and heard some interesting perspectives.
The Rise of "The Innovation Professional"
Innovation is undoubtedly the hottest buzzword these days. For example, you will find vastly increased number of people with the word "innovation" in their titles or job function if you search on Linked In today. That's great news, however, the innovation owners very often do not have the budget or the authority to implement ideas; that is the prerogative of the P&L owners. I have found this dichotomy very frustrating since it requires a dance between two different owners to achieve your innovation objectives.
My view was that innovation should really be a part of everyone's job function and we need to eliminate this dichotomy. Contrary to my belief, I heard overriding sentiment in the conference that the specialized innovation role is a must-have in an organization. This view sounds self-serving at first but as I heard people talk about their experiences I found an answer to this dilemma. No one was disputing the fact that every employee, customer, and partner should be part of the innovation process. They were simply pointing out that innovation teams are instrumental in orchestrating that process. They play a role very similar to the one played by brokers, advertisers, distributors in the free market economy.While everyone chips in with their ideas and sponsorships, innovation team administers the process, helps people present their ideas, and connects different players to optimize the process.
Have idea management tools become a commodity?
The speaker from 3M made a comment that the ideation tools have become a commodity. We certainly seem to hear about a new ideation tool every day that has a catchy interface and a cool slogen that claims to help you eliminate world hunger. I agree with this assertion if you limit the scope of idea management to idea collection, commenting, and voting. That has certainly been commoditized and almost all ideation tools would work very well for smaller communities with campaign style ideation. Unfortunately if you select a platform that is limited to this functionality only, it does not scale very well for large communities.
Innovation is not an event, it is an ongoing process. Making this process successful requires a combination of active community management, education, and the right tool set. Many routine tasks become major pain points as the community size increases. Spammers and users that try to game rankings and rewards becomes a bigger issue. Sponsors find it increasingly difficult to read each and every idea posted in the system. They need assistance in finding common themes and duplicate ideas. My feeling is that social innovation (or for that matter socializing any business process) is in it's infancy. Some of the tools in the market offer a far better alternative to older methods but there is still much to be learned. Until that happens, it is hard to imagine this space becoming commoditized.
Prelude to Idea Collection
Can Campbell Soups learn anything from Nike? Seems like the soups folks were inspired by the way Nike is improving customer loyalty by creating a Web site that provides fitness help. What does cat litter have in common with burn bandages? Both need absorbent material that removes odors. These are some examples of how businesses can innovate by observing other companies in acompletely different sector or products that seem unrelated but have solved analogous problems. Such strategies are crucial for a successful ideation process. In fact idea sourcing or collection itself is the easiest phase compared to what comes before (ideation framing and creative thinking methodologies) and after (evolution, evaluation, selection, and implementation).
Whirlpool presentation described another strategy to spawn creative thinking. Traditionally the decision to buy appliances is made by the woman of the house and appliances go either in the kitchen or the laundry room. When you present these observations, somewhat obvious questions that come to your mind are: why target only women? and what about other rooms in the house? This lead to the Gladiator brand that caters to men and focuses on solutions for organizing the clutter in the garage.
A couple of presenters including the person from Campbell Soups described observation-focused ways of innovating. Both of these projects, however, involved a small number of people in the analysis of those observations. I think they will see much better results if they allowed a much larger number of people to examine those observations. In other words combining traditional methodologies with social innovation tools like Spigit would provide a huge benefit.
Miscellenous Tidbits
- Innovation is a Sale - Really? - Jean-Mark Frangos from British Telecom took the innovation professionalism to yet another level by casting his job function as making a sale. In this analogy, ideas are products, P&L owners are the customers, articulation and visualization are your sales tools. Now that's innovative
- Andrew Douglass from Rhodia illustrated how six-sigma techniques can be applied to the innovation process. Their existing process was resulting in a high failure rate for ideas that had passed the proof of concept stage. By examine the causes of failure and preparing a check list of criteria at the early stage reduced the failure rate substantially.
- Heard about the thank you program in IBM where employees can suggest gifts for other employees based on their personal experience. I thought this would be a good addition to Spigit's virtual economy
