Choosing the Right Open Innovation / Crowdsourcing Platform
Here you get the chance to share your insights and experience on a real case in which a company needs to choose a service provider for their open innovation efforts.
It is a consumer-product company in Asia and they want to create a crowd-sourcing platform in which they can engage customers to generate ideas. Subsequently the company should be able to turn this input into ideas and innovations that drive business growth through this platform. The company has contacted a few solution providers and now they need to make a decision.
I like how the company has developed a set of questions that gives us an idea of what a company in such a situation focuses on. Perhaps you can help answer some of these questions or share other insights?
1. Who is more suitable for the job? An ideation crowdsourcing platform provider (e.g. Bright Ideas) or a market/consumer research agency using social media or technology to compliment the research job?
2. What is the most suitable form of the campaign? Should it be a short-term but intensive 3-month program or more like an ongoing ideation platform/community for public access?
3. Is there any single vendor having an offering that can engage external consumers (e.g. interactive on social media to generate ideas), and internal business departments (e.g. change management to turn ideas into innovations) equally well?
4. Most open innovation / crowdsourcing success stories are from US or Europe. Are there any notable successes in Asia? If not, why?
5. Are there any successful stories on using Salesforce Idea Platform, other than Starbucks & Dell?
6. What crowd size is better for a crowdsourcing campaign to generate ideas? Should you involve as many consumers as possible to discuss broad topics (e.g. MyStarbucksIdeas) or should you work with a small group of diversified customers for intensive and in-depth interaction to generate ideas on particular topics (e.g. online focus group)?
The company has also identified two clusters of service providers.
Cluster 1 consists of crowdsourcing solution providers with the likes of Spigit, BrightIdea, Napkins Lab, Hype.de, Lithium and Salesforce. They focus on idea generation (with all features such as game mechanism, rewards, incentive to encourage input). Some of them have a process to filter and follow up with ideas to further concepts and products.
Cluster 2 consists of market research agencies or similar such as Chaordix, TNF Global and Flamingo. They are basically market/consumer research agencies that use digital technologies to recruit/engage focus group (also called crowd) to derive insights. The difference is that they can reach a wider audience than traditional offline focus groups, but other than that, everything else is typical research jobs – e.g. very intensive interaction and in-depth engagement with focus group to get qualitative and quantitative research.
Both clusters call themselves crowdsourcing or crowd intelligence with slightly different focus (and similar pricing also) making it a bit confusing for the company to make a decision.
So here you have a real case for a company trying to choose the right platform. You input is highly appreciated : – )
I think it's less about the platform and more about the objectives. If you are looking for a bunch of ideas that can be grouped, collated and actioned, then the 'ideas' platform is the way to go. If however, you want to understand the (sub)conscious needs of your customers and prospective customers in order to create something totally surprising that fills a gap they didn't realise was even there, then the 'reasearch' platform may make more sense. It's critical though, that the process which follows the research phase is intelligent and rigorous enough to lead to revolutionary products. Great innovation is not about giving people what they want, its about giving people things they had never thought of and later cannot believe they lived without. Check out StanfordD school for a great human centred design/innovation process.
I agree, Leapingmac. The objectives should be the center of the crowdsourcing initiative. Innovation platforms can deliver the consumer gems (that they didn't know they needed and soon won't be able to live without), but often times need intelligent direction to achieve this. There are communities trying to achieve this with consumer products, such as http://www.quirky.com/ and http://www.geniuscrowds.com/.
"I think it's less about the platform and more about the objectives"
Ditto.
Hi Stefan,
this is an interesting topic! I think you tenk to forget that when choosing an Open Innovation partner who leverages crowdsourcing, there are two elements: (1) a platform and (2) a crowd or community.
Your two clusters only comprise actors who can provide you with a platform or a way to manage an Open Innovation initiative, but who don't have a community of motivated and interested people who can contribute.
- platform providers like Spigit or BrightIdea are very good at building a functional, customized platform that is open for everyone (by that I mean both internal and external stakeholders). However, if you don't know who to talk to or if your subject is boring, it's tough to get relevant participation
- agencies/consultancies like Promise or InSites are another useful way to generate ideas and/or insights, but they are more marketing-focused and less innovation-focused. They allow you to connect with consumers in various ways but to me they fall more into the Co-Creation than the Open Innovation
I'm surprised that you don't speak about innovation intermediaries that have both (1) a platforms and (2) a community!? Think about Innocentive, Kaggle or eYeka, who have more or less open platforms, motivated communities and regular challenges that run on their sites. This allows companies to host challenges even faster that the 3 months you talk about above, companies can have new ideas or solutions within weeks! Their crowds are big and very diverse, both on the skill-side than on the geographical side.
About OI initiatives in Asia, it's quite limited indeed. I know of some experimants (http://yannigroth.wordpress.com/2012/05/05/crowdsourcing-in-china-learnings-from-the-red-mat-design-experiment/), platforms (http://yannigroth.wordpress.com/2012/03/02/understanding-participation-on-a-massive-crowdsourcing-platform/) and examples (http://yannigroth.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/consumer-creativity-across-cultures-the-case-of-basketball-fans/) but that's not really open innovation. Nokia translated ints website IdeasProject into Chinese too (http://yannigroth.wordpress.com/2012/01/18/one-brand-different-platforms-part-8-nokias-wise-approach-to-crowdsourcing/), but I'm not sure what they got out of it…
Hope this helps!
This is an interesting point. I feel that the crowd seems to be the most overlooked factor in crowdsourcing. Many companies new to crowdsourcing approach it thinking that recruiting a crowd is easy, and all crowds are made equal. This is not true. Recruitment can be difficult depending on topic and incentives, and mature crowds show significantly different results than young ones. And I would suggest that crowd/platform packages can also present difficulties, being that the crowd has very little vested interest in digging deeply into the proposed problems. Crowds with emotional investment in a brand are ideal, though more difficult and expensive to acquire.
Interesting indeed,
I would say that just how Ideas are basically only as good as one's ability to implement them correctly, the same can be said about OI. You need a powerful yet simple and fun platform and an active and engaged community. Both of these assets are a prerequisite in order to be able to create shared mutual value within an OI ecosystem.
Thanks all, I appreciate your input! Stefan
Many more Open Innovation / Crowdsourcing Platform / Innovation Management system exists the the few mentioned here…
Check out http://www.ideamanagementsystems.com/ for a list of most IM systems existing.
When you leave things open ended, create a system or use a platform, and then just expect people to "show up" and be excited about what you are doing, it is doomed. People want direction, they need to be led. Once in a while you find a self-starter out there, or a group of people who have some vision, but for the most part people have an addiction to leadership.
Reading these comments I see this emerging:
1. Focus on objectives
2. Determine an activity based on a graspable objective
3. Provide an incentive for consumers and/ or innovators to participate
People care, but not that much, there has to be a reason for them to want to take action beyond caring about something. This is what I'm learning in my efforts.
Another thing to consider when evaluating the different options available is the type of community you want to form and like other commenter’s above have stated, the objectives of course. There are several different types of communities often times lumped under the umbrella term 'open innovation'. A strict definition of open innovation will likely draw the line at a transfer of technology, where needs are posted by a company (think P&G connect & develop or Krafts Collaboration Kitchen -http://bit.ly/KIZGMj). So there are really three types of communities being talked about:
1) OI platform – (PG, Kraft) – ongoing exchange of technology/innovations where needs are posted and guide innovators, etc. on what the company is seeking ideas on.
2) An on-going feedback channel- often linked with company product website, this is more in the co-creation mode where continual feedback from customers helps inform product roadmap and enhances the product overtime in line with customer needs.
3) Challenge or contest- one time or time-based challenge (tons of examples GE’s Ecomagination for one- http://bit.ly/c7hwDn)
In all these cases, it is important to chose the right technology provider that provides the functionality to easily setup and manage the community overtime, but also take those ideas and route them to where they are needed most within the organization in order to drive measureable results. Often times, it’s a combo solution where a solution provider like http://www.brightidea.com will work with a partner to deliver the ‘crowd’ (on the 3rd type of community mentioned above) like Nine Sigma, etc.