Voice of Community

Innovation, Community, and Social Networks (Part 2)

I attended a joint TEDx and Bay Area Executives Meetup a while ago on how customer social networks are making an impact on innovation, and how employee networks within organizations are helping to break out of organizational silos and cross organizational boundaries.
The conference was divided into two sessions with separate panels on:
• Engaging innovation externally
• Engaging innovation internally
This is the second of two articles about innovation, community, and social networks. This post is about engaging innovation internally. The first post discusses engaging innovation internally.

Susie Wee, CTO at HP, talked about the diverse vehicles for innovation at HP including the
• HP Garage (18,000 registered users, 5,000 ideas – all read, all answered)
• Techcon – technology conference
• Insiders
• Incubators
• Co-Creation/Co – Innovation

Wolf Cramer at IBM talked about “action” networks. Need to translate ideas into action. No problem generating ideas. Everyone can generate ideas. But what do you do with them. Need to connect  “idea networks” with “action networks”- who can get things done in the corporation. IBM provides seed money for 3 months and then must pass through various decision gates to pilot and before launch. He also talked about innovation hubs based on social media and collaboration.

Getting new features into a product is easier than creating a whole new product through crowd sourcing.
Rob Daniels at Salesforce talked about Chatter, their “Yammer. He found that Chatter was a great way to discover “hidden heroes” and celebrate their ideas. Top 25 influencers rewarded every 6 months.

Tad Milborn at Intuit talked about focusing on groups “already inclined” to be social and to talk about topics. Aim for the least barrier to entry. At Intuit, 10% of time is allowed to employees for innovation and creating new ideas. (Dan Pink in “Drive” points to Google employees who get “20% innovation time”, 1 day per week to work on a side project. Pink notes that Google News, Gmail, Orkut, and Google Translate, all came out of 20% time.) Their internal Brainstorm infrastructure has around 12,000 views per month.He pointed to “innovator fatigue” where after the bloom of the initial idea fades to be replaced by testing, business plans, marketing, and launch. Ideas need a whole ecosystem to bring them to fruition, not just an infrastructure for generating ideas.

Big takeaways for me regarding internal innovation were
• Innovation can’t be relegated or assigned to one group. It needs to pervade the whole organization if it is to be most effective. However, it does have to be driven centrally to ensure that diverse innovation initiatives are leveraged to their fullest.
• Need to translate ideas into action. No problem generating ideas. But what do you do with them. Need to connect “idea networks” with “action networks”- who can get things done in the corporation.
• Innovation needs to be made part of the corporate culture – “10% time” at Intuit, “20% time” at Google – time set aside for employees to work on their own projects.
• Rather than references to great articles (although these are useful too), need to Yammer more about what we’re doing, to create those serendipitous synergies.)
• Ideas need a whole ecosystem to bring them to fruition, not just an infrastructure for generating ideas.

To read my full write up of the Conference, see TCGen and Bay Area Meetup Social Innovation Conference

Innovation, Community, and Social Networks (Part 1)

I attended a joint TEDx and Bay Area Executives Meetup a while ago on how customer social networks are making an impact on innovation, and how employee networks within organizations are helping to break out of organizational silos and cross organizational boundaries.
The conference was divided into two sessions with separate panels on:
• Engaging innovation externally
• Engaging innovation internally
This is the first of two articles about innovation, community, and social networks. This post is about engaging innovation externally. A second post discusses engaging innovation internally.

David Cruickshank of SAP talked about their Labs Project which is open to partners and customers to try out their ideas and technologies.  SAP feels that it “get’s it” about innovation and has an Open Innovation office where innovation projects are shared and not “stolen” by the sponsor, which can be a big fear from external innovators. IP (intellectual property) is a big issue. 
New Ford site in Deerborn with its Open Innovation facility is another example of customers designing product rather than simply commenting on your proposals – “more than 100,000 applications created in just two years, mostly by individual programmers within the open source community, the spirit of “open innovation” has made the App Store an unprecedented success”
IP works best with complementary partners that have no interest in each other’s area of expertise, for example, a database application and a hardware company (although there are examples of these kinds of relationships not being as harmonious as they ought to be.)
My key take-aways:
• Crowdsourcing and customer involvement as a prime source of innovation is here to stay and is increasing
• Crowdsourcing can be very good for incremental innovation; disruptive breakthroughs, perhaps not so much for sustained development because he crowd might miss stuff.
• Need to position yourself to become the 'escape valve' of ideas
• Difference between consumers and enterprise with respect to innovation: consumers not generally about money, enterprise is ALWAYS about money
• Pain  points for external innovation are:
o Socializing the value of co-creation internally, and
o Negotiating IP
• “Technology has the life of a banana” (Scott McNealy)– don’t waste time on IP issues, get product to market
How have you attempted to encourage innovation around your products and services from your company? Have you been successful? Have efforts been sustained or are they isolated and intermittent? Do you even believe in customer innovation?

To read my full write up of the Conference, see TCGen and Bay Area Meetup Social Innovation Conference