Welcoming a collaborative tool for innovation management into an organization is like opening the door to Mr. Chaos.  It’s scary, but necessary.  You have to allow some disruption (via disruptive technology) to introduce radical change.  And radical change is what is required for any organization to survive in the long term.  And, let’s face it, it will be the best innovators who trounce the competition.

Every social scientist seems to agree that too much structure with no room for experimentation and failure will let a group only take incrementally improving steps.  Dramatic change requires dramatic steps.  Creative chaos needs to be welcome.

The technologies that help organizations synthesize ideas toward the path to new product or service development differ in their approach.  Some believe in the value of reputation so some contributor’s opinions are worth more than others.  This is diametrically opposed to the democratic fundamentals associated with a Web 2.0 world.  Within the crowd, everyone is equal…just not every idea is equal. 

Others believe consensus by vote is the measure of success.  This seems to rely on a belief that every idea benefits solely on votes.  Anyone who has ever written a good headline knows they can get a positive click even when there is no substance behind it.  Therefore even the smallest spark accompanied by a good title and a great picture can bubble up to the top by votes. The potential might be there, but it takes more than just votes to be really sure.

The real trick is to employ good social process design coupled with collaborative tools and then backed up by some good, old fashioned Management 1.0 (so YOUR management believes the innovation team when they say THIS idea is worthy of promotion).  So a couple simple rules help a very complex process:

1.       Use strategic guidance.  The group is not necessarily going to benefit by receiving a bunch of unsolicited ideas…what the group needs is help in a couple specific areas.  So challenges need to be put in front of the crowd:  help us with this.  For instance, maybe our company needs a new technology to address this emerging market need; to fill a gap in our product line; to get ready for the Christmas Season with a breakthrough new green service to save trees.  Let’s get everyone’s input on what course we should follow.  This way we can tell management, “Here’s the concept we want to get behind and here’s why”.

2.      Use the wisdom of the crowd.  An idea gets promoted by votes but not only by votes.  Let’s tap into the collective intelligence of the collaborative environment (and good social science):  Who bookmarked this idea?  How many times was it viewed?  What kind of comments did it get?  How many people replied to the comments?  How many objects were attached to enrich this idea (like pictures and articles and videos and links)?  How many people were invited by peers to follow this idea?  Now we’re cooking with steam!  Good social process design will also help an idea move toward the goal line.  Affinities can be noted between ideas so they can be merged or clustered.  Affinities can be noted so experts are suggested to be drawn into the process.

3.      And let’s use Persuasive Design to get participation.  Most will agree rewards don’t work for radical innovation.  Whether it’s a T Shirt or a Car or a badge of honor.  Just like the word “free” in an advertisement will get you a set of false response statistics, rewards will get you incremental ideas based more on the reward than the idea itself.  Persuasive Design will entice folks to work on your project.  So a prominent invitation to an expert; a dramatic spotlight, a luring color will get folks to consider your premise (while the strength of your idea will get their participation).  And the intrinsic reward for participating is watching our company take our suggestions and doing something with them and getting peer recognition and personal enrichment in return.

The yin and yang of innovation includes creative chaos coupled with structure; social science melded with social activity; collaborative tools married to traditional analysis methods.  And it doesn’t hurt that a group gains Organizational Engagement and Strategic Alignment.

It is a challenge to welcome chaos. But it is also a necessity, because only a disruptive approach will bring required change.  A strong social process design will help structure to emerge from chaos and give the team the guidance and support it needs to be successful.

Penicillin, polyethylene, yellow sticky notes and the impotence pill. Just a few of the countless innovations that are the result of serendipity, a particularly intriguing phenomenon in which you discover something unexpected and useful while you are actually looking for something completely different.

Serendipity is sometimes described as ‘an accidental invention’. Wrong, if you ask me, because an invention is never purely coincidental. Clever people with a vision have a good chance to make these supposedly accidental discoveries more often. Or as Louis Pasteur once put it: "Fortune favors the prepared mind." Before Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, the observation that has lead to the discovery was probably already done by dozens of others. But Alexander Fleming was the first to really notice it. His vision was the trigger to actually observe and analyze this new phenomenon.

If you observe nature and society from the right mindset, they form an inexhaustible source of inspiration for new discoveries. But achieving real innovation also requires people with the ambition to actually do something with these discoveries. Only until ten years after Fleming’s discovery a group of researchers began to isolate small amounts of penicillin, purifying them and obtaining sufficient quantities for bringing the medicine to the market. And the ‘failed’ adhesive Dr. Spence Silver invented was not applied until Art Fry came up with the idea to use Silver's adhesive to make the famous Post-it bookmarks with it.

Hence it is essential to share our vision and ambition with as many people we can inside and outside the company. The more we are aware of each other's ideas, the better we can make associations, synchronize and cooperate. Intense social interactions not only enrich the outcome, but also the persons who have contributed. New opportunities will float to the surface naturally, as well as the right people to successfully achieve them.

So let me share my vision with you:
I am convinced that the new wave of innovation revolves around efficiently harnessing the creative potential of people, and I believe that the innovation of social processes, using social software and supporting technologies, will be crucial to detect and exploit new markets faster and more efficiently.

Take it from me, enterprises need a smart collaborative system to make certain people are poised to exploit their discoveries. True innovation is the result of collaboration, sharing visions and ambitions, merging and clustering ideas and insights, and shaping high value concepts for the market.

And as far as our ambition concerns, we have plenty here at Indie Group. With our CogniStreamer® team and technology, we are definitely planning to play an important role in this social revolution. Anybody in for some collaboration?

There’s more than the front end of innovation for organizations to concern themselves about.  Once an IDEA management system is rolled out, a plethora of ideas ensue.  Most software tools have attributes to help promote good ideas for further review, but then what?  The software out there typically then falls short. And this is exactly where true INNOVATION management systems make the difference.

Collaboration Tools in Idea Management

The wonderful Web 2.0 tools, embraced by the enterprise, can facilitate the collaboration required to capture, share and assess ideas, and help promising ideas bubble up to the top.  But these same attributes may not be the best weaponry for organizations to shape ideas in a fashion that readies them for the market.  Certainly we want the crowd to participate in the process.  And for sure we want good ideas to develop in order to keep users participating.  So collaboration is good.  But more is required!

SWOT Analysis Works

More pragmatic and effective business tools are required to shape incremental ideas (that show promise) into radical concepts.  Generalists from amongst the team can assess innovative concepts to discover what strengths exist.  They can envision what opportunities present themselves if the concept is deemed worthy.  And subject matter experts can eyeball potential threats, whilst the naysayers within the group can help identify the weaknesses of the proposal. 

SWOT analysis is a logical, fundamental approach to make sure innovation concepts are truly ready to have budgeted investment dollars assigned for further exploration.  SWOT takes a long hard look at a concept’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.  This tried and true method also wraps facts around an innovation concept so management understands why the team believes in the original ideas and insights from which the concept emerged.  Management can see the solutions proposed to address the black hat’s contributions  (like the threats and weaknesses) so then are free to appreciate the strengths these concepts bring.  This helps facilitate the new opportunities involved.

©1999-2010 CogniStreamer® Innovation Portal

Is It Feasible For YOU?

SWOT analysis is just the first step of the shaping process. It is a qualitative approach that still offers enough freedom to choose the discussion topics.  But in order to reach the next level of the new product (or service) development cycle a final quantitative assessment is required:  the feasibility study review.  During this review phase an organization looks at the viability of new concepts using different scales, such as the cost benefits, the commercial potential or the strategic fit within existing product lines. 

The real issues are two: 

1.  The criteria for this last phase of analysis are unique to your organization’s culture.  You have a certain way of looking at things and your innovation management software should be flexible enough to support your approach.  If shelf space, or safety or government compliance are  more important issues, they need to be on the list of aspects you assess. 
2. Each contributor needs to understand what the consensus is on each of these scales and be able to both measure and justify their own perspective.

IDEA management systems are built around ideas. They can serve as the backbone of your company’s ideation process.  It can supply the collaborative tool to facilitate organizational engagement as well as strategic alignment.  These Web 2.0 attributes, along with strong science from software experts, can ease the ideas along toward further processing.  And good idea management software programs all have this.

Real INNOVATION management systems also have a pragmatic and effective process to drive innovation towards execution, to merge ideas into concepts and to ease the shaping of concepts on their way toward the finish line of new product development.

Ron Shulkin is the Vice President for North America at Cognistreamer.  He writes extensively on idea management software and tools to facilitate the innovation process.  He can be reached at 847.949.4290 or ron.shulkin@cognistreamer.com. 

When air travel was shut down due to the cloud of volcanic ash from Iceland, I was among the tens of thousands of stranded passengers.  During my quest to get back home from Seville, I started to realize that the chaos caused by the volcanic eruption perfectly illustrated a core principle of our Jazz of Innovation philosophy, namely, that errors, randomness and the unexpected contribute very strongly to the success of collaborative creativity.

By sending a plume of ash into the atmosphere the volcano caused an unseen chaos in airports and railway stations. My travel companions and I ended up getting stuck in Barcelona without any chance to reach Brussels by plane, train, bus or car.  Like many others, we were forced to step out of our comfort zone in order to find alternative ways to travel.  However, not everyone responded to the new situation in the same way.

It occurred to me that the key principles of the technology adoption lifecycle – the well-known curve describing the five different groups in the uptake of innovations – also applied here.

In the Barcelona station, hundreds of people were standing in a depressingly long queue. Some of them (the ‘laggards’) stared at the sales counter and continuously checked their watch, still convinced that they would actually be able to get hold of a long distance ticket. Others (the ‘late majority’) probably understood that it didn’t make much sense to queue for tickets anymore, but they were just doing what everybody else did. They appeared to be more relax, talking about the ash cloud and waiting for what would happen next. The ‘early majority’ were also still queuing, but they were looking around nervously to see if any other possibility would emerge, prepared to leave the queue at the first sign.

We decided not to queue and jumped on a local train to Figueres up north. The first thing that struck me on that train was the positive and creative vibes among the travelers. People were looking at maps, sharing thoughts, discussing the options. Somehow it made perfect sense because most people on that train belonged to one of the leading adopter groups (innovators and early adopters). But it was only after we got off the train in Figueres that this really became clear to me.  There was only one bus available to Perpignan, and most seats were already taken. So, we had to wait for the next bus which would arrive in an hour or two. Not surprisingly, only a minority settled for that ‘mainstream’ option and everybody else immediately started to look for alternatives. When somebody suggested grouping and sharing taxis to cross the border, almost everybody participated.

We continued our travel up north, but it still took another 24 hours before we got home. At some point, we even had to call in a ‘rescue team’ to drive down by car and pick us up. But we still arrived several days before the people who preferred waiting to get back by airplane or long distance train. 

Finding alternative ways to travel was not the obvious choice, but the unexpected forced us to explore, collaborate, self-organize and adapt. Today, most companies understand the value of challenge or campaign based innovation, but few understand the dynamics of the adoption lifecycle. Make sure the innovators and the early adopters have the creative space to explore new solutions, experiment and fail.  But don’t expect everybody to jump in right away. And certainly don’t force immediate participation by late adopters because they will stifle the innovators’ efforts.  

 

This interview was taken during an Enterprise 2.0 vendor exhibition, so it’s rather oriented towards competitive advantages and USP’s of CogniStreamer. In less than 3 minutes it’ll give you a good idea of what CogniStreamer is all about: how it works, why it is different from other tools and how it improves innovation performance.

Wim Soens talks about CogniStreamer on Vimeo.

How does CogniStreamer work?

Wim - "CogniStreamer is a collaborative innovation platform that brings web 2.0 concepts to the enterprise in order to create high performance collaborative innovation. Now, the very nature of web 2.0 - which is about collaboratively generating, sharing, remixing and filtering content - is perfect to apply to enterprise innovation, so CogniStreamer combines web 2.0 tools such as blogs, wiki's, social networks, content aggregators and search and filtering technology all into one slick enterprise application."

Why is CogniStreamer different from other tools?

Wim - "What makes CogniStreamer really stand out is that it takes into account the specific nature of an enterprise ecosystem, which is different from the web. There are much less users, so we need a much higher activity rate for enterprise collaborative platforms to work. To tackle this CogniStreamer has unique persuasive technology features to activate and motivate community members to collaborate.

Another challenge in enterprises is that you also want to involve the digitally averse people, which makes usability a key issue. The CogniStreamer interface designers have put a lot of effort in designing a very intuitive and userfriendly interface, and turned CogniStreamer into one of the best designed collaborative platform available.

Finally we took great care to provide the necessary features to protect privacy and intellectual property, which is very important in a professional enterprise context. CogniStreamer developed a unique security management system for that, but we kept it flexible enough to respect the self-organizing dynamics of web 2.0 collaboration and allow creative chaos."

How does CogniStreamer improve innovation performance?

Wim - "We have created a unique concept - which is called the ThistleTube - to manage collaborative innovation. It uses different mechanisms and technologies to achieve this. First CogniStreamer has very advanced seeding management features to give strategic guidance to the ideation process. Also, CogniStreamer has powerful collaborative filtering algorithms to rank ideas, tag gardening technology to structure content and data mining to analyse collaborative behaviour. Finally we use unique persuasive technology to manage the group flow and drive the innovation community towards result."

In part I of this blog post I already gave a few arguments to why Web 2.0 concepts such as social networking, crowd sourcing and agile development are finding their way to enterprise innovation.  First, I argued that the core concept of web 2.0 simply matches the front-end-of-innovation model of collaboratively generating, sharing, remixing and filtering user generated ideas.  My second argument was that web 2.0 collaboration addresses a growing need for shorter product cycles and faster innovation through community involvement and access to more innovation resources.
The third argument that I briefly introduced and would like to explain further here is that implementing web 2.0 collaboration solves a few process flaws that result from applying a sequential stage gate model to a chaotic environment like the fuzzy front end of innovation.

Although the intention is good and justified, companies should pay careful attention to the effects of opening up the front end of a stage gate innovation process. Without proper prepartion it will be much like opening Pandora’s Box. It will trigger a cascade of problems that will completely stall the front end innovation process, simply because the sequential stage gate model is just not designed to handle collaborative innovation. There are three major problem areas: the ideation quality during the ideation stage, the screening capacity at the first screening gate and the assessment risk at the first assessment gate.

1. Ideation Quality

   Opening up the front end will give you more ideas. And there will be more breakthrough ideas to. That’s if we just consider the absolute numbers. But if we look at the ideation quality – i.e. the ratio of incremental ideas vs. breakthrough ideas – we see a different story. Without proper measures to give strategic guidance and focus to your innovation community your ideation quality will actually deteriorate.  One could argue that ideation quality doesn’t really matter, because in the end it’s about getting more breakthrough ideas. True, but the consequence here is that the huge amount of ideas that has to be generated for that purpose causes a new problem at the next gate of the process downstream: idea first screening.
   

2. Screening Bottleneck 

   The sequential nature of the stage gate model implies that all ideas go through the first screening gate. Usually, the screening is handled by a few individuals or smaller teams that gather every month or so to go over the harvested ideas and ‘separate the chaff from the wheat’. In average only 20% of the ideas will actually get across, which is perceived by the screeners as very inefficient and an 80% waste of valuable time. So when the ideation process is opened up to the complete enterprise, multiplying the stream of ideas by 10 or 100, a screening bottleneck is most likely to occur. To keep the flow going in the stage gate model the only solution is to get more screeners, increase the screening frequency or implement stage gate idea management tools to improve screening efficiency.  The downside is that this is all getting very expensive.  Even if you manage to keep the stage gate model afloat there is a third hurdle to take: the first assessment.

3. Assessment Challenge

   Opening up the front end of innovation will eventually produce rich and out of the box concepts that reach the second stage gate. More than your company can handle in the exploration and development stages that follow downstream, even if you consider internal or external venturing. The assessment challenge is about choosing which project your company is going to invest in first. It’s a tough call, because without exploration data the uncertainty is still very high.  On the other hand, there’s little room for mistakes, because the cost of failure is increasing exponentially from this point forward.

The bottom line is that when you consider opening up the front end of innovation, you have to address the issues above by redesigning the front end innovation process.

The first measure is to improve the ideation quality by implementing a challenge driven approach.  ‘Seeding’, as we call it here, is the process of identifying strategic innovation opportunities, translating these into challenges and launching them to trigger and guide the community towards breakthrough innovation.

The second measure is to remove the screening stage gate in the front end. Actually, the concept of screening ideas and especially killing them is hard to understand (unless you are an ancient Spartan). Few ideas are right from the start. Some have potential but need time to develop. And even weak ideas have value because they can spark better ones. So, instead of a sequential idea processing machine, a continuous collaborative environment based on web 2.0 concepts is required in order to generate, share, nurture and combine ideas, and turn them into high value concepts.

Finally, collaborative decision support should be implemented to enable first assessment. The final decision is still the responsibility of senior management or venture capitalists, but initiating a collaborative review process among a diverse community will provide valuable opinions and facts that will facilitate decision making.

To quote John Hagel from the Deloitte LLP Center for Edge Innovation, “The next wave of innovation by enterprises will depend on the ability to connect people together more effectively and provide them with tools to support collaborative creation”. Ultimately, this will require Enterprise 2.0 innovation tools such as CogniStreamer® that take full advantage of Web 2.0 collaborative technology.

Now that I’m fully recovered from a bad case of  jet-lag-drowsiness it’s time to look back on the Optimizing Innovation Conference, which was held October 21-22, 2009 in New York City. During this 2-day conference, corporate innovation leaders from Whirlpool, Pfizer, Google and Kraft Foods (just to name a few) shared their thoughts and insights on how to improve innovation. (For a detailed coverage of the Optimizing Innovation Conference, check out Braden Kelley’s Blogging Innovation.)

The past few weeks, it was impossible not to notice the desperate quest for Google Wave invites on Twitter. One blogger even tried to auction-off his invite on eBay, with bids reaching $5,000 before the auction was shut down. Many years in the software business have taught me to carefully consider which waves to ride – or more importantly which ones to ignore. But the buzz about Google Wave made me very curious to say the least. Obviously, I’m especially interested to find out how Google Wave’s real-time communication technology and features apply to Enterprise 2.0 collaboration and innovation.

According to Mashable, Google Wave is a real-time communication platform. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client. I like this. Integrating communication, networking and process oriented tools in one slick application is the key challenge for any collaborative platform developer. However, I do admit that the real-time aspect worries me a bit, and it’s clearly causing a lot of turbulence in the blogosphere to.
The integration of live aspects into Wave looks very attractive, but at the same time it creates a kind of complexity and inefficiency, also described by bloggers Steve Rubel, Robert Scoble, and Louis Gray. The point is that in this era of ‘attention crash’ professional knowledge workers are seeking exactly the opposite: simplicity and productivity. For the same reason, part of our R&D effort at CogniStreamer is focused on computing technology that reduces and simplifies collaboration processes in order to increase efficiency and performance.

But let’s be positive. Apart from this real-time issue, Google Wave introduces many interesting features. Playback for instance, where you can playback any part of the wave to see what was said – really helpful if you want to join a discussion that’s already halfway. On-the-fly auto-translation is another example. Most of our clients are global companies active in several continents all over the world. Internet got everybody connected, but for these companies, language remains an important natural barrier. In-line translation could be the answer to connect Chinese, Dutch or other native speakers in one collaborative platform.

On the Enterprise 2.0 relevancy scale however, the way Google Wave integrates Robots – automated participants within a wave – is very promising. Robots can modify information in waves, interact with users, communicate with others waves, and pull information from outside sources. But the most interesting aspect is that they behave like another person within a Google Wave conversation, except that they’re automated.

In my previous post I wrote that the use of persuasive technology in CogniStreamer is aimed at forging connections, improving communication, and enabling coordination. To achieve this, we are using agents (or bots) that monitor and analyze the collaborative activity to find persuasion windows, and then gently trigger individual users (our user groups) to connect, discuss or collaborate. One important principle is that the agents’ interaction should be perceived as friendly advice from fellow users. Google Wave sets a perfect example with bots interacting through the same communication and discussion channels used by the human users.

To answer the question, not all features introduced in Google Wave are probably equally relevant for Enterprise 2.0. (Or maybe they are, but some of us are just not ready for them yet.) The future will tell. But I’m convinced this is a big step in the right direction. Getting closer every day…

It doesn’t happen very often unfortunately, but driving back last Thursday night from the Design for Persuasion conference in Brussels– the biggest persuasion conference in the world so far - I really felt satisfied, inspired and enriched. I’ll remember this conference because it made me realize that B.J. Fogg’s field of study on persuasive technology is extremely relevant for our research on collaborative innovation here at CogniStreamer®.

In a nutshell, persuasive technology is about using digital media to influence and change people’s behavior, attitudes and emotions. People interested in this topic can check out the book by B.J. Fogg (Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do).  It’s rather funny actually, because this book had been lying around on my desk for weeks until this conference on Persuasive Technology persuaded me to read it. Writing this I realize that in fact, this perfectly illustrates the concept of Persuasion Windows, one of the key insights presented by B.J. Fogg and several other speakers such as Amy Shuen (author of Web 2.0:  A Strategy Guide), Dan Lockton (Brunel University, London) and Richard Sedley (cScape). Persuasion windows are key-moments when people are more open to being persuaded, arising when personal motivation and ability coincide with a trigger or a call to action. Being able to identify, open and use persuasion windows is central to achieve behavioral change. (See BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model to learn more about this.) But even more crucial for an effective persuasion strategy is to think clearly about the target behavior or the type of behavior you seek. Because not all behavior is the same, BJ Fogg developed the Behavior Grid framework to show what types of behavior change might most easily be achieved through certain persuasive strategies and techniques.

Facing the challenge of collaborative innovation and crowd sourcing, companies increasingly make use of web 2.0 technology and tools to carry out and coordinate the fuzzy frontend of the innovation process. However, there are a number of issues in taking web 2.0 tools that have succeeded in an open web environment and applying them to the enterprise, one of them concerning how to motivate, enable and activate enterprise community members. For this reason, the CogniStreamer® Innovation Portal is equipped with process design features based on enablement, interaction and self-organization, in addition to standard conventional process modeling techniques that are biased towards predetermined task sequences and data structures. Persuasive technology is highly relevant in this context, because it focuses on attitude or behavior change resulting from human-computer interaction.

I believe that a collaborative tool should above all be suggestive, offering guidance and warning, more than high-level control and regulation provided to keep things on the straight and narrow. For this reason, the use of persuasive technology aimed at forging connections, improving communication, and enabling coordination among groups of people is such an interesting area of research for us.

Big thanks to the event organizers Christel de Maeyer (Howest, plugMedia) and Dr. BJ Fogg (Stanford University) for putting this together! I’m looking forward to next year’s edition.