Innovation + LinkedIn: Where is the value?
Almost everyone I meet in the international innovation community has a profile on LinkedIn. Of course, some are more active than others, but I am overall a bit puzzled on how little value people in the innovation community actually seem to be extracting out of LinkedIn.
I wonder about this because I really like LinkedIn and use it for several reasons. They include:
• build and maintain an overview of my professional relationships
• reach out for input to my own ideas on innovation
• get inspiration on new trends and ideas within the global innovation community
• create exposure for my blog
• develop a following of like-minded people within the innovation community through my network groups on LinkedIn.
My groups include the Leadership+Innovation group, which is for people working on the intersection of leadership and innovation in large, established companies. I call these people practitioners, and they work in the trenches of innovation. Consultants, academics, start-ups and venture capitalists are not accepted into this group. The reason is that there are many groups that accept everyone, and I wanted this group to be something different. I also run an open group: Open Innovation by Stefan Lindegaard which is open for everyone interested in open innovation.
We have more than 700 people in the Leadership+Innovation group. They include the best and the brightest of innovation practitioners, and the combined knowledge and insights of these people is quite amazing. However, very little happens within the group. Other than myself, only a few people post questions, and only a few comments are made in response. This is in sharp contrast to the activity on my blog, where I receive comments on nearly every posting.
Recently, this has led me to view the Leadership+Innovation group as more of an experiment. What will it take for these people to begin extracting value of such a unique community? What are the barriers for participating and what can be done to eliminate or lower these?
I believe two immediate barriers hinder the full use of LinkedIn:
• People are too busy. Most people are reluctant to explore new things if they are not able to get a fairly accurate prediction on what the return of investment on their time spent will be. People are simply too busy.
• Most people are too old. LinkedIn is a community for business people. This results in a higher average age than users on Facebook, and I believe many of the LinkedIn users are simply too old. It should be understood in the sense that the younger generation (age 28 and below) is much more accustomed to virtual communities and they just get much more value out of their efforts. However, recent data shows that the portion of people over 30 who are joining virtual communities is growing so there is hope on this front.
Where is the value in LinkedIn and can you extract it?
Let’s move the discussion back to the value LinkedIn can offer the innovation community. There are at least three good reasons why you should spent more time on LinkedIn.
• Build and maintain your relationships. The most common perception is that LinkedIn is about networking. It is an important offering and you can have many approaches on how to connect with others through LinkedIn. It is my policy to connect only with people whom I have met in real life or had enough virtual interaction with so that I get an idea of what the person stands for. I recently wrote about this in another post. Check this link: Why should I connect with you on LinkedIn?
Other people choose to connect with people they have had only a small amount of interaction with and still others choose to connect with as many people as possible, including people they do not know at all. They treat it more like a phone book where they’re trying to amass names. No matter which approach you chose, this is the heart of the original idea behind LinkedIn.
You need about 200 contacts on LinkedIn to fully exploit the system through using other people’s contacts; this many contacts will give you a huge reach due to the power of the six degrees of separation phenomenon. This raises a question. Should you race to get to 200+ contacts even if it means you end up connecting with people you do not know? I would advise to take it more slowly and try to keep the bar as high as possible although you might have to loosen up a bit on this in order to get traction and begin to really extract the value of LinkedIn.
• Identify people with specific knowledge. Who knows about acid errosion? Or something else? Just use the search functions and you will get a rather impressive overview of the other experts out there.
• Access to knowledge. Actually, I believe the main benefit of LinkedIn in relation to innovation is the opportunity to tap into a wealth of knowledge – and share your own. The best way to do this is to search the groups and join the groups that seem most relevant for you. Personally, I am involved in 26 groups which you can see by clicking on my LinkedIn profile.
The groups that I find to be the most active and rewarding are Front End of Innovation, Innovation People Experts Innovators Creative Network, Killer Innovations and Open Innovation Discussion Group.
You can also create your own groups on your issues or topics. This could work internally within your company as well as externally since you control who is able to join, which enables you to create both public and closed groups. If you go this route, as you develop your group I would ask you to consider what I believe is one big problem with most groups on LinkedIn suffer from. They seem to be more focused on getting the most members rather than providing value. This results in a lot of discussions that are quite frankly useless. You can also tell who has the incentive – or more so – the time to be active on LinkedIn. Consultants are definitely the most active, then academics and at the very bottom are the practitioners.
Do not get me wrong on this. Many consultants, academics and others have a lot to offer, and I have really enjoyed my interactions with many of these people. But it does make it harder for practitioners to have a peer-to-peer conversation, which is one key reason why I limited the Leadership+Innovation group to practitioners only. I think we need different groups for different purposes. So if you’re going to develop a group, carefully consider what your purpose is first and then create the group accordingly.
Here are some reasons for creating a group:
• Knowledge-sharing
• Build and maintain relationships
• Build exposure for yourself or for your team or company
• Become a thought leader – increase your own value and become recognized within your chosen areas
By the way, if you do not want to get too many updates from the groups you join, you should change the update frequency to weekly rather than daily. Click on Settings in the navigation menu for the group.
As with any tool, LinkedIn is only as good as the effort you put into it. Figure out your reason(s) for being on LinkedIn and then decide on a strategy for using it based on those reasons. I have found great benefit in being part of this community, and I hope you will too.
Hello Stefan,
I participate a little bit in LinkedIn groups, but I know for me that it is only sporadic because there are so many places to participate (blogs, Twitter, facebook, etc.).
I must say that I was inspired by your post to start a group on LinkedIn:
Continuous Innovation
(it's on page 2 right now – but hopefully it will be on page 1 by the time you read this)
- http://www.linkedin.com/groupsDirectory?results=&…
All the best,
Braden
(@innovate on Twitter)
Hello stephan,
Very interresting post as usual. I have to admit that I am not active enough on the groups I am in on linkedIn.
One of the reason is sometime the lack of time even if I spend the time to read almost all of the posts in the various groups I participate. I fully agree with you we are all pushing for open innovation and on the other hand we are showing a poor acitivty in networking which is the first step for open innovation.
As the group(Leadership+Innovation) is not so big and it is a good thing I would propose to try to add dynamic.
One proposal could be that each of us we add on top of our profesionnal objectives a personnal one which is to involve at least one of our peer in the group at solving one of our issues and then report it to the group through a post cosigned by the group members who have been involved in the job.
Like you I strongly beklieve that a group made of practionners should have a lot to share and even more to gain, up to us to make it happen.
We can’t complain about how difficult it is to promote innovation in our respective companies and not using the incredible experience of our peers to help each others.
Any comment or other ideas are welcome
cheers.
patrick.
Hi Stefan,
I have just started spending more time on LinkedIn. I will test it for a period i.e. by working more in the groups (Just started one myself “Rapid Innovation) and communicating more with my own connections. I will do this for a period to see what I gain from it. If nothing changes and I cannot see the value of my efforts I need to look elsewere.
I realize that networking is important for your working life (and social) but like in all other situations we need to select methods that will give us the most “Bang for the Buck”.
Looking in my comments above it seems like I want this and I want that, but it works both ways. Offcourse I want something out of it, but I am also more than willing to help others if posible. That is how it works.
Have a nice weekend – B.r Claus
I think an important thing to add is that in the current situation there is even more reason why people should use LinkedIn. Everybody is getting squeezed to the core on budget – especially within such areas as innovation. This should make all of us who is working with innovation to make use of low-cost tools/resources and to ramp on ideas for how to improve innovation once the environment starts looking better.
Stefan,
Like you I often think how can you extract more value out of Linked In and its incredible community. As you rightly say the practitioners are the silent majority and getting their participation and contribution is key to learning more from innovation- how it works, why it works and where it works. I took the route to join a large number of groups (presently 25) and am finding many of them lacking the sustaining power, yet we seem to be getting even more! I’d like to see a few good, lively groups than this fragmenting of the innovation message where the practitioners often never see or quickly click off or it lacks appeal to them- just take a look at many of the messages, they centre on what they want out of it. I would argue this is where LinkedIn needs a change in strategy. It has added much in the recent years to see its value multiply but its general ‘open’ appeal limits it down I feel when you get into specialisation. Even you have decided to limit group members for Leadership+Innovation but why really?
Picking up on two immediate barriers- reducing down this fragmented innovation message into a few good, thriving groups would help to encourage greater participation but
Most people are too old-hmmm. Not sure if I can agree with you on that one. Drawing comparison to Facebook I can see but it does have two different types of audience or should do. LinkedIn should be more business contact minded, Facebook more social contact minded and having more older people on this is part of its appeal, Older is not age related it is knowledge and experience related for me and LinkedIn needs to draw this out more.
Where you are pointing to something that does have interesting possibility is in peer-to-peer conversations. If you take the open innovation principle of connecting to work on a topic or challenge then this is where peer-to-peer can grow. We need to build topics more into conversations that are relevant to the practitioners so practitioners will get drawn more in
Regards
Paul
Hi Stefan,
I have been playing around with LinkedIn for quite a while now but only recently (last 6 months) started joining groups. I have found that there are a few challenges.
- When you work for a large multinational, a large portion of your network are your extended co-workers. Great for keeping connected, but not necessarily the forum you would use to have discussions.
- Cultural – as an engineer (previously in larger R&D org, now in international engineeirng firm) I find that my colleagues are not convinced about social networking, seeing it as a “fun activity” as opposed to advancing the work. We tried to get more technical discussions going on in our internal communities but found it challenging.
- Groups – I have to say that so far I have used the groups to find the blogs I want to follow, like yours, but otherwise have not found a lot of great content on the groups themselves. Having read your post, I think I need to spend more time experimenting with different groups until I find the ones that are most useful to me.
Thanks,
Em
You might be interested in my 9 point earning on getting deeper conversations going on Linkedin from participation in the Consumer Insight Group
http://explorate.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/linkedin-discussion-groups-how-to-stimulate-deeper-longer-conversations/
Martin