Essential features of a scalable social innovation platform

The overall outlook and expectations towards social business software have changed dramatically over the last few years. Most enterprise decision makers have stopped questioning the value of social technology and are now more concerned with finding the right enterprise social platform that can support large communities within and beyond organizational boundaries. The trend is especially stronger in open innovation (or social innovation as I like to call it) communities. As a result, a number of existing players in innovation management have re-focused their product strategy to incorporate social elements. We are also seeing a large number of new idea management products entering the market at a rapid pace.

Although it seems that idea and innovation management tools have become a commodity, the reality is that most tools are limited to running campaign style idea collection leaving idea evaluation, filtering, and ranking in the hands of a small group of sponsors. This approach may be sufficient for some of the smaller ideation campaigns but does not scale very well when the community size and the number of ideation efforts go up. In order to be scalable, a social innovation platform must enable sponsors and community managers to:

• Clearly frame ideation objectives and engage the right audience for optimal results
• Manage online behavior of community members such that meaningful contributions are promoted and spamming/gaming attempts are minimized
• Ensure diversity of participation and connect the right set of collaborators belonging to the long tail
• Create an engaging experience that keeps users coming back
• Leverage the crowd to filter and rank ideas to minimize bias and management overhead
• Choose the right balance between crowd sourcing and top-down control

In this blog post I outline a core of set of features that must be present in a social innovation platform in order to effectively meet the needs listed above. Note that I focus only on advanced features that go beyond basic functionality such as idea posting, commenting, and voting.

Multi-tenant architecture and templates
Innovation efforts in large organizations involve multiple regions, lines of businesses, and ideation goals. We certainly recommend creating a global ideation site that allows the entire community to collaborate across organizational silos, however it is also necessary to create destinations visited by different population segments. The social innovation platform must allow sponsors to easily set up new communities and invite relevant sections of the user population for participation. Moreover it must allow innovation leaders to set up community templates with terminology, look and feel, evaluation and ranking mechanisms representing different ideation objectives and policies. Community templates significantly reduce the barrier to entry for new ideation sponsors; accelerates the learning curve and thereby minimizes effort required by the core innovation team to bring the new entrants up to speed.

User reputation
Innovation communities face two opposite types of problems: users posting too many ideas or an inactive community with too few ideas. The root cause in most cases is improper ideation framing. Some large communities, however, suffer from the former problem in spite of having a dedicated innovation team that clearly defines the goals. When the noise drowns out the substance, it makes it more difficult to make productive contributions and drives away serious users. Computing user reputation is an effective strategy to cope with this problem.

It is important to note that reputation is a reflection of quality of contribution not quantity. Some idea management tools use the term reputation to indicate activity level. Reputation rank should be determined not by how many times a user posts on the community, but how he community reacts to the user's online behavior and participation.

The reputation ranking of users has three implications for community management. First, displaying reputation on the leaderboard is a way of giving social recognition to your top contributors. It also creates a sense of competition, a great motivator for almost every kind of user. Second, the reputation score can be factored in idea ranking greatly improving relevance. Third, if reputation is tied to currency or points earned by users, it encourages users to be active in a meaningful way.

Reputation can also be used as a stick. The innovation platform must detect spammers and users who attempt to game the system. Reputation score for such users should be dropped to zero or a very low number thereby limiting their ability to get points and influencing idea ranking.

Game mechanics
The term game mechanics or "Gamification" is becoming quite popular in the context of social media discussions. This obviously does not translate to introducing Farmville to your community. That will probably result in having the "too few ideas" problem that I mentioned earlier. Gamification should really be about creating a fun, competitive environment for your innovation community that makes the site sticky in a positive manner. It should be designed in such a way that winning the game requires participants to align their behaviors with innovation objectives and strive to improve overall community health.

Gamification goes much beyond getting Foursquare badges (although that could definitely be part of it). It should include leaderboards that displays users by reputation, virtual wealth, and top innovators in addition to different types of idea rankings. Users should be able to acquire special powers that allows them to moderate content, view restricted areas or access functionality not available to other users. Mechanisms like idea markets and prediction markets are another example of constructive gamification. These mechanisms are not only a fun way of engaging the crowd, but they also enable sponsors to aggregate opinions of many and derive results that assist in decision making and making predictions.

Automated idea graduation
I recently heard a great quote about the value of crowdsourcing:

It's not difficult to find a needle in the haystack if you enlist the haystack to find it.

The point here is that it's a lot easier to find great ideas and solutions when you open up ideation challenges and problems to the entire community. I believe in going even further and enlisting the crowd in filtering and ranking of ideas in addition to initial suggestions. When you leave idea evaluation and ranking entirely in the hands of the sponsors, it is problematic in a couple ways. First, you really expose yourself to the biases shared by a small group of people. The HiPPO problem (highly paid persons opinion) is a corollary of this issue. Second, the innovation committee becomes a bottleneck in the innovation process as the number of ideas increase.

The innovation platform must support a way of filtering ideas in multiple stages. The number of stages and criteria associated at each stages can vary based on organizational culture and the type of ideation. We recommend a three-stage process that has worked well for most of our communities. The criteria for moving ideas forward in the initial stage should be fairly simple such as buzz, conversational levels, votes, etc. The second stage should raise the bar on simple metrics and add more in depth scrutiny (e.g. Multidimensional reviews, expert evaluations, etc.). The last stage should deploy a mechanism like idea markets that leads the users reveal their true preferences.

Idea and user recommendations
Every social innovation community I have examined demonstrates the long tail behavior in terms user activity levels as well as the number of users that collaborate on a single idea. There is typically a very small percentage of users that are extremely active and a few ideas that attract widespread attention. On the other hand a large number of users participate at a more moderate level and  there are many ideas that attract only a handful of collaborators. Interestingly, the ideation process is very democratic. Successful ideas don't just come from hyperactive users, many of them come from the long tail. As a result enabling collaborators to find each other on the long tail becomes crucial to success.

As the idea volume goes up, it becomes increasingly difficult for the long tail users to connect with like minded users and ideas that they have an interest in. In such cases, the innovation platform must make or recommend such connections based on user profiles, their participatory behavior, and social network analysis.The connections can be presented via a user-centric presentation of ideas and like-minded users. Alternatively recommendations can be pushed to the users via email notifications.