First, open your kimono

The Xprize incentive 2 innovate conference was this week in New York, with Don Tapscott and Reid Hoffman among the speakers. Companies like Johnson & Johnson, Pepsi and Procter & Gamble as well as well as Unicef, USAID and the US Department of Energy were in attendance – all looking to better understand the future of open innovation and how to apply it as leaders.

We sent Claudia Moore, our VP of Marketing, to check it out and report back to us. First, she mentioned how the location set the tone of the conference. Being at the UN would be a pretty cool experience. Below are some standout points from the conference that really resonated with me.

So what does it take to create an open innovation culture? Reid Hoffman emphasized the need for tolerance of failure (learn and play again) and leaders walking the talk. Martin de Beer of Cisco emphasized the need to tie people’s compensation to innovation. And Judy Estrin called for leaders to translate the issues our companies faces into challenges for all employees to help solve.

Crowdsourcing done well follows all of the principles of open innovation: transparency, embracing failure en route to answers, rewarding innovative acts, fostering critical thinking, connecting people and breaking down hierarchy.

The ingredient for an open innovation culture that had us saying “huh” came up in the conference’s opening remarks by Keith Ferrazzi, author of “Never Eat Alone.” He looked out at attendees sitting in the not-so-casual UN and said “nothing innovative can come out of this if you don’t loosen up… if you don’t open up.”

That got us recognizing that crowdsourcing is also a modern means to foster trust.

Crowdsourcing online makes it comfortable for more than the few outgoing, comfortable-in-the-boss’s offices, group talker types to chime in. Crowdsourcing within organizations like Intel, Procter & Gamble, Cisco, British Telecom and Dell have all proven that online open innovation draws a bigger crowd of employee contributors than traditional group brainstorms, or other big-think meetings. The preference to type versus talk shocked cell phone companies when they first launched texting and noticed demand quickly overtake voice use. It’s simply more comfortable to contribute online than it is to contribute live and in person. (In fact even at the conference, discussion on Twitter was more thought-provoking than the live break out sessions, search twitter with the hashtag i2i to see for yourself).

So crowdsourcing is enabling a trust shift. Great leaders know the critical questions to ask. Great leadership comes from trusting employees to contribute innovative answers.

Photo by Martin Haesemeyer