The Jazz of Innovation

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."

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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.

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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.)

I think the audience really liked the quality and the content of the keynotes. And so did I, especially with such topics being addressed as:

• discovering innovation champions through social networks (by LinkedIn),
• promoting inter-business unit collaboration to increase innovative projects (by WhirlPool),
• leveraging social networking technologies to enable colleagues to provide, assess and network around ideas (by Pfizer),  or
• utilizing ‘launch and iterate’ as a process for rapidly shaping and developing new concepts (by Google).

As it happens, most keynotes created a perfect angle for my talk on ‘Implementing Enterprise 2.0 Innovation’, which was scheduled near the end of the conference program. In fact, my opening hook was the question why Web 2.0 concepts such as social networking, crowd sourcing and agile development are finding their way to enterprise innovation.  There’s more than one answer to this question obviously, but I narrowed it down to three here.

First, applying a web 2.0 model to the front end of the innovation process just makes sense. The core concept of web 2.0 – i.e. collaboratively generating, sharing, remixing and filtering user generated content – perfectly answers the front end requirements. Just replace ‘content’ with ‘ideas’ in the above definition.

Second, web 2.0 imposed itself to enterprises by changing their business context. Over the years, the internet has contributed to a globalized economy, enabling enterprises to reach out and expand. But web 2.0 has created a need for speed.

adapted from Amy Shuen - Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide

Spurred by swifter information flows and the increasingly powerful collaboration technology of web 2.0, companies now have to compete with shorter product cycles and faster innovation.
A lot of keynote speakers addressed this issue, presenting cases similar to Google’s ‘launch and iterate’ or Pfizer’s ‘test and fail fast’ innovation strategy. This clearly shows a growing need for Enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools such as CogniStreamer® to enable community involvement and access to more innovation resources, which is of course good news for our industry.

Last but not least, implementing web 2.0 collaboration solves a few very important process flaws that very often occur when a sequential stage gate model is applied to a chaotic environment like the fuzzy front end. There’s more to this than can be covered here, so I’ll write about it in another post later.

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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…

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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.

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