My three principles of new product development

Spigit recently released a Facebook application that exposes Spigit's social innovation management functionality on the platform. It is always thrilling when something you help create sees the light of the day. In this case it was particularly satisfying because we followed my three principles of new product development with a great degree of success (thanks to FacebookEngage product manager Nina Chai and Pratim Mukharjee, the lead developer on the project).

Simple but not Simpler
I have lead the evolution of the Spigit platform from an abstract concept to the leading social innovation platform used by over 100 organizations all over the world. Initially we had to take a leap of faith in creating the first version of the product. Combining idea management with social networking was a new concept for a lot of our prospective users. We certainly made a lot of untested assumptions to create that first version. We did strive, however, to minimize the number of assumptions and create something that was simple (with a minimal feature set) but not simpler, i.e. it provided unprecedented benefit to the end users. We have started Spigit's Facebook application development much the same way. The initial version exposes minimal functionality. It's a proposal to our customer base which they use, review, and evaluate.The rest of the course will be charted by combining customer feedback with our own intuition and understanding of the marketplace.

Native Experience
There are some products that are so revolutionary that they change existing interaction paradigms, processes, or even the way of thinking. Most others need to seamlessly fit into existing  lifestyles and usage conventions. They must blend with established usage patterns and feel completely native to the user. We had to be very careful about this blend for the facebook application. A large portion of Spigit's user base is in the enterprise space. Facebook users are significantly different in their expectations, attention spans, and motivation to participate. Spigit's Facebook application deliberately sports a non-enterprise, lightweight look. The primary motivation of Facebook users is keep in touch with their social circle. The Spigit apps plays into that by making the user aware of ideas posted by your friends and how many of them made into the top ranking list.The ideas are displayed very much in a wall-style format. When a user posts an idea, posting that on the wall or sending message can be done with minimal effort. In general, we have made every effort to introduce Spigit functionality in a way that is consistent with ethos of Facebook community.

The Wow Factor
A new product should have at least one or two features that make a user go "Wow that's useful!" when s/he uses the product. When I started using iPhone, I had that reaction when I realized that unlike my previous mobile windows-based phone, the screen goes dark when I put it to my ear but it comes alive when I hold it in front of me. With Spigit's facebook launch we did not have a problem introducing the Wow factor. We pulled in some of Spigit's key features deemed relevant to Facebook. We included idea theme clusters that allows administrators to get a sense of emerging trends and topics. Reputation scores identify key contributors in the community. Spigit's social analytics is available to the administrators via Spigit's regular user interface. Subsequent versions of the app will track user feedback and will build upon the initial feature set to make it even better.

Thoughts on spigit, idea management, and future of social innovation

Javed Mohammad, a community manager at Spigit, interviewed me recently. This blog post simply the transcript of that interview. The conversation has also been posted on the Spigit blog.

JM Before companies like Spigit came along how was idea management handled?


PD Before spigit, idea management was mainly done in a very top-down manner. A very small set of technology and business leaders were responsible for innovation. The flow of ideas was mainly uni-directional, going from the leadership to the rest of the organization.

JM And what was the implication of that?

PD The process was very rigid and lacked transparency. We have now seen several instances where so called experts make decisions that turn out to be worse than those made based on input from a diverse set of people. The universe of ideas was also vastly smaller since the process relied on a very small group of people.

JM Somewhere along the line you got the inspiration for Spigit. What was it?

PD At the time we founded Spigit, social networking was already popular in the consumer space. We had seen isolated instances of blogs and wikis that went beyond just the social chatter and attempted to provide business value. For example, we were noticing a lot of bloggers proposing interesting ideas with business potential. The original concept was to create a product that would facilitate turning these raw ideas into real products and services.

JM How did you combine what would seem to be two incompatible applications one consumer and the other business into a product like Spigit?

PD That's really our key distinction. When we started Spigit, you either had consumer-facing applications that supported online social networks or you had traditional enterprise applications that supported very opaque and rigid processes like Stage Gate. We wanted to retain and leverage the social, fun aspect of consumer oriented applications, but at the same time channel that social energy in a very productive way. Secondly, we needed an engine for analyzing social exchanges and create actionable intelligence for our enterprise sponsors.

JM How does one provide “fun” in an Enterprise application?

PD Introducing "fun" in enterprise applications is getting very popular these days. In face now there is a name for it: "Gamification". Gamification is the application of game design principles to non-game applications to influence user behavior in accomplishing real life tasks. It is about creating a fun, engaging experience for users that encourages them to perform tasks that they might otherwise find tedious or common place. Frequent flyer programs is a classic example of how gamification helps build loyalty. In spigit, we realize it via leaderboards, user badges, reputation, idea markets, etc.

JM We hear a lot about “the wisdom of crowds.” Who or which type of organizations have been able to leverage this wisdom?

PD Any organization where there is a common goal and collaboration of its community. They have to be open, transparent and able to execute. As long as they are willing to implement ideas that come through the idea funnel, and the community sees that as a reinforcing behavior, those are the organizations that thrive.

JM Can you give any examples that are public?

PD AT&T has a company-wide innovation program built on top of the spigit platform. That's an example of an internal idea management program that is very democratic. Cisco's I-Prize that was looking for the next billion dollar idea is an example of external facing application of Spigit's technology. I-Prize is also an excellent example of the power of idea markets, one of the key gamification features in spigit. The top three ideas predicted by the markets were exactly the same as the ones selected by Cisco.
JM Gartner in their Hype cycle for emerging technologies shows Idea Management as having crossed the trough of disillusionment. When do you think it will reach the plateau of productivity which I guess is Nirvana?

PD Idea management, the way Spigit pioneered it, began about 4 years ago. I have seen a measurable change in the attitude of enterprise decision makers towards this technology. Questions have changed from "should we" to "which tool". I think it would still take one or two more years to reach maturation and it may not reach the plateau in isolation. Idea Management will most likely be combined with other business processes like Talent and Resource Management, CRM, etc.

JM What excites you about the field of social innovation and what’s your prediction for the future of ideation?

PD The current solutions have done a good job of decentralizing idea collection process. We could definitely improve collaboration and idea evolution by providing intelligent matchmaking between potential collaborators. In many cases, ideation framing is still done by a central group. There is still a single sponsor and they are responsible for doing selection and implementation. That part needs to be decentralized. Fundamentally, it is all about collaborative problem solving and the future should enable a decentralized, peer-to-peer communication among seekers and solvers.

JM Thank you.