Social Media Tools in Open Innovation Efforts
Companies have begun using social media tools in order to further build their networks and engage with their innovation stakeholders.
This creates what we can call touch points – situations in which a person or company interact with their current and/or future stakeholders.
Here are a few touch point examples:
• GE has an app for their Ecomagination challenge, which gives them an additional touch point that interacts nicely with their website for the challenge.
• Chris Thoen @cthoen is an active twitter on P&G’s open innovation efforts and others things related to innovation. This can help Thoen and P&G build an innovation leadership position as the innovation community appreciates efforts to distribute knowledge and insights.
However, Twitter is just one touch point in order to reach such a position. Other touch points could include a blog or a LinkedIn group focused on P&G’s corporate innovation capabilities.
• Whirlpool recently launched such a group on LinkedIn.
• Through their Intuit Collaboratory website, Intuit – among other things – announces events in which they interact physically which startups. At their latest event in August, we saw lots of tweets and although they did not deliver much learning, it was still nice to see how they have begun using Twitter.
• Psion experiments with Twitter Chats in which they share insights on their open innovation efforts.
Psion’s next chat brings in three of their executives who will share their views and approaches on open innovation. It happens on September 2nd at 9am EST. As 15inno helps them on this, we are using #15inno to track the tweets.
I like how companies have begun to incorporate social media tools in their open innovation efforts and look forward to sharing their lots of challenges and successes as they do this.
It would be great to get the community involved in this and some starting questions to you could be:
• What social media tools are companies using? What works? What does not work? Why?
• What are the key elements a company should consider before they embrace social media tools?
• What can a company gain by embracing social media tools in their open innovation efforts?
Can you add other questions? Can you share some examples that address the questions?
I look forward to hearing from you.
Hi Stefan,
Would you classify a private ideation platform as social? We used a ranking/ideation platform this year to reasonable (not outstanding) success in developing a submission for local government for a client. This exercise worked well, however taking the data to the next level was difficult and tool almost as much effort as if we were to come up with ideas ourselves (although they would’ve have been as diverse). I think when you are using social mechanisms you really need to understand what you are going to do with the data afterwards, because the data will be messy and won’t fit into a friendly 4 quadrant model.
As an aside, I personally think that when you’re thinking about open innovation tools and platforms it can be useful to remember that there are middle grounds, as in “open” might mean a customer group, or your suppliers etc. don’t just think if you want to do open innovation (particularly ideation type exercises) you have to immediately open it to the public.
Cheers,
Andrew
Thanks for your comments. The response on crowdsourcing-like initiatives can indeed be really messy. This is why focus on your desired outcome is important throughout the process. If you know what you are looking for and plan the process according to this, you will have a much better chance of being able to get something worthwhile out of your efforts. Unfortunately, many companies and organizations mess up on this.
Open innovation does not mean public innovation. You can definitely still do open innovation – which I define very broadly as combining internal and external resources and act on the innovation opportunities this provides – within a closed ecosystem with selected partners. So I agree with you that there are middle grounds that we need to have in consideration.
Stefan
Great blog and good information. Thanks for share
Cheers,
Tijs