Where’s the Value? – Put Others Before Yourself

How can I benefit from this? Whether we like it or not, this is the most common question people ask when they are presented with new opportunities or options.

This is no different when you visit corporate open innovation or crowdsourcing platforms. You can find several of such examples in this blog post, Open Innovation Examples and Resources.

Potential contributors to such platforms will ask a simple question: How can I benefit from this?

Unfortunately, most platforms do a poor job of explaining the value to these people. Often, there is more information on how the platform can bring value to the company, but honestly: Who – outside the company itself – cares about this?

Companies need to turn their approach on this upside down and focus much more on the value those potential contributors can get out of working with them. Once the potential contributors understand they can benefit, they will also help the company itself – and others in the given ecosystem – get value out of such initiatives.

I often discuss this with corporate innovation units. Most often, they have not given this much thought, but they are usually very quick to admit that I have a valid point.

I believe this is a question of open innovation maturity and I was confirmed in this belief during a recent visit with Intuit, a Silicon Valley company that offers financial software and services. For the record, I believe Intuit does great things on open innovation and I often point to them when I am asked about interesting cases outside the fast moving consumer goods industry.

I met with Jan Bosch, VP of Open Innovation and a couple of his colleagues. During our meeting, Jan said that one of their key learnings on their fairly new Intuit Collaboratory initiative is that they need to make the value to outside contributors more transparent. They also needed to instill a higher sense of urgency.

These are great insights gained through experience. Few companies can match the open innovation experience you can find at Intuit. This is just another reason why they should look around and learn from the success and failures of others.

By the way, one of the colleagues Jan brought to our meeting came from their corporate communication department. I have often said that companies need to focus even more on communicating and branding their corporate innovation capabilities. I was pleased to learn that Intuit shares this view : – )