25 Oct 2009

Web 2.0 Finds Its Way to Enterprise Innovation

by Wim Soens

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.

Image002

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.