Crowdsharing and Beyond: Innovation Lessons from O2

This is a guest post by Shomila Malik, Innovation Manager at The Lab – Telefonica O2.

I’ve been running an innovation programme inside O2 UK (part of the Telefonica group). It started as a small pilot and has grown into a company wide program that is producing new products, services and ways of doing things. It’s called O2 Crowd and includes a crowdsharing tool (provided by BrightIdea) to share ideas, comments and votes.

Employees from around the business with a problem or challenge to solve, come to my team to use O2 Crowd. We design and set up a challenge for them and ask the crowd to help.  One challenge was entitled ‘how do we create more fans?’ which led to the launch of a service called Helping Hands that empowered any employee to help our customers directly through a dedicated customer service team.

We found O2 Crowd helped inter departmental collaboration by posing challenges from department to another. For example, a senior marketing manager posed a challenge to the Technology department, asking for a technical solution for a product. This resulted in a solution being found within weeks which is now in delivery. We also discovered problems that weren’t widely shared around the business could be brought to the attention of those who could help, leading to solutions which were often simple to implement. This was the case when Customer Service found a solution to a common customer issue through O2 Crowd, which resulted in over 1,000 less calls to the call centre every month. An easy technical solution was available but it was only when customer service put the idea on O2 Crowd, that the right people could make the connection.

O2 Crowd has been running for 18 months now and although it was a slow build up, it gave us a chance to embed the process and culture, allowing us to fine tune as we went. We now have 3 live challenges running, 2 in the pipeline and people from all around the business interested in how they could use it to benefit their teams.

Along the way, I’ve picked up 5 key lessons which I would advise innovation managers to consider.

• Top level commitment – I was lucky enough to have our CTO’s support right from the start. This was crucial as his open commitment along with other senior managers helped send the message out that it was a serious endeavor.

• Identity and brand – I was keen to create an identity so it wasn’t referred to as ‘that innovation tool’. A colleague suggested O2 Crowd which fitted the bill and allowed us to be creative with graphics, an intro video and headed newsletters.

• Community – I referred to books such as Fearless Change (Mary Lynn Manns & Linda Rising) as guides to creating a community and Tribes (Seth Godin) for tips on the marketing side. Often, internal crowdsourcing initiatives rely on people being expected to join in as part of their job but this is an assumption to be weary of. I had to work at it by evangelizing as often as I could, recruiting and encouraging early adopters and promoting every success, however small. Modest rewards were given for ideas that were selected, even if they didn’t end up being delivered. This helped to encourage the act of posting ideas to embed the innovation culture we were seeking.

• Fast feedback –About the same time as we launched O2 Crowd, we started using Yammer, an enterprise social network, which had attracted a huge number of members in O2 in an entirely viral way. I would use Yammer to promote challenges, post news on selected ideas and help me evaluate ideas. The real time nature of Yammer and the fact we had a large and diverse network meant I could go through ideas quickly, crossing off the ones we were already doing or weren’t possible. People on our Yammer network also promoted O2 Crowd by posting about ideas they’d just put up which often resulted in lots of useful feedback to help with evaluations.

• Fast execution –At the early stages most ideas were driven through by appointing senior manager sponsors, adding the idea onto the back of other projects and plenty of favours. This could only last for so long. We now have a team called The Lab who can take those ideas that need trying out and build a prototype or beta. The speed and agility of The Lab means that if we have a great idea for an app, it can be delivered in weeks within O2. This is immensely powerful to have in combination with O2 Crowd.

We’re still learning and there is plenty to do to keep the programme growing. We can’t force innovation to happen, but we’ve laid the foundation to ensure that we’re equipped to capture, evaluate and implement ideas quickly, which we hope will lead to a more innovative business.