Over the past few months, I’ve had the pleasure of working with a number of European organizations on crowdsourcing projects, and one thing in particular has struck me: Europeans seem to value the collaborative side of crowdsourcing more than the prospects of having the crowd pick a “winner”.  Given the geography, history and cultures in European countries, this isn’t surprising.  They collaborate cross-boundaries as a matter of their daily lives, even share a common currency.

But it has made me stop and think a bit more about huge collaborative benefits some crowdsourcing models can bring.  We’ve talked about the pros and cons of the contest model in past blog posts and even indicated that it’s not our favorite crowdsourcing model.   We don’t give it top marks because contests discourage the collaboration that we find to be the most interesting part of crowdsourcing.

Luckily, there are far more crowdsourcing models that do encourage collaboration. With a properly designed crowdsourced campaign, you can enable collaboration among people in different departments who would normally never cross paths as a part of their jobs. What’s cool about that is so often we hear that the breakthrough idea came from someone you never would have expected.  Crowdsourcing can also help bridge different corporate cultures, say after a merger of two different companies, by focusing everyone on a particular problem or challenge.   And with a community on your crowdsourcing site, it can become an ongoing way to identify people with specific skills or experience for future projects or collaborations.

It’s like the old saying – the journey is more important than the destination.  With crowdsourcing, it’s great that you can have the crowd help you select an idea that has potential, but even more powerful, the crowdsourcing process can help everyone organization work better together.

Crowdsourcing isn’t an all or nothing undertaking

Opening up your organzation to let the crowd in likely isn’t as difficult as you imagine. Instead of thinking about crowdsourcing as an all-or-nothing proposition, consider the different stages of innovation where crowd input could help you better perform:

1. the crowd submits ideas – put a call out for ideas
2. the crowd refines ideas – get people to evolve ideas they’ve created or you have
3. the crowd comments/votes – assess preferences and gather input on crowd generated ideas or your own
4. the crowd shortlists ideas – filter down from a mass list to crowd-preferred frontrunners
5. the crowd picks winning idea – from shorlist the crowd creates or you do, get the crowd to rank the top favourite

There are lots of crowdsourcing instances where the crowd participates in all five ways to come up with a winning idea. You can get highly valuable data though, by inviting crowd contributions at just one or two points along the full crowdsourcing path.

Idea generation & favouriting - 1 & 3 Combo: What products and services do you want from us? What do we do best? If wondering how your customers see your brand, how satisfied they are with your service, or what they wish you would launch next to the market - just ask them. Suddenly you will have a vantage on demand, and your market rank that you never had before.

Make expert ideas market relevant - 2, 3, 4 Combo: If you still want to be at the helm of the idea-generation, you might get a crowd of experts to create new product ideas for example and then have the crowd refine and shortlist the ideas to things they want to buy, and maybe vote on what they’d pay for them.

Crowd winner pick - 5 only: Want to launch the product enhancement that most thrills your users? Why not share your top 5 enhancement ideas and let them pick what they want you to deliver. They could even vote with development dollars if they want to fund your technology build.

As soon as you let the crowd in, you’ll see the value of open innovation however small you start. Experimentation and high-value discovery and market prediction is what has led many organizations to make a whole-scale business shift to open innovation.

photo by: mistersnappy

It saddens me to hear leaders reference Henry Ford’s quote “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” as a justification to innovate in a vacuum from customer and market input.

The rationale for closed, internal innovation is often a belief that the outside world isn’t nearly as capable at discerning product needs as a few people in leadership roles. Or those leaders may feel they get paid to know what the customer wants so they shouldn’t need to ask. Both are backward thinking.

This blog is evidence of what I’m talking about.

I started by wanting to do a blog about the real conversation Henry Ford should have had with his customers… First, I searched the web to read thoughts by citizens worldwide on the “faster horse” quote Mr. Ford. I quickly found Luke Hohmann’s blog which states perfectly what I wanted to say. He had this idea first, he is a more skilled writer, and he’s completed the job faster than I was able to myself.  Open innovators are listening to and capitalizing on all of the Lukes out there. They are driven to achieve the market-relevant invention, the fastest and most economic way possible.

So over to you Luke:

“…innovation occurs from a deep understanding of your customers — their problems, their needs, expressed or unexpressed. Suppose that Henry had asked a customer “What do you want” and the customer has answered “I want a faster horse”. I’m willing to bet that Henry, one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time, would have explored this a bit further…

Henry: “Why do you want a faster horse?”

Customer: “So I can get to the store in less time.”

Henry: “Why do you want to get to the store faster?”

Customer: “So I can get more work done at the farm.”

Read the full blog

Photo taken by: Willdebeast

Remember when email first hit the scene and was feared as an unruly and lawless tool to propagate information chaos and over-disclosure? Well I discovered those same fears are conjured by today’s social tools and crowdsourcing among major enterprises while at an IBM conference on data governance in New Platz, NY.

First, a big thank you to IBM & Steven Adler for the invitation to participate and contribute.  The conference was at Mohonk – an amazing location for such a thoughtful retreat, and I spent the entire time surrounded by IBM customers and partners.

There were two tracks to the conference ‘Data Assets & Risks’ and ‘Governance & Compliance.’ I joined Mark Oestreicher of Harper Collins, Bobby John of Brainpark, Gerry Katz of Citigroup, Megan Murray of Booz Allen Hamilton on a panel to discuss Enterprise 2.0 and Self Governance, which was moderated by Traci Fenton of WorldBlu.  Each panelist presented our thoughts on data governance and how it relates to Enterprise 2.0 and this whole concept of self governance. Followed by tough questions from the corporate crowd!  I introduced the concept of crowdsourcing for enterprises to discuss how freely data (including profile data) is submitted in crowdsourcing communities today where members are contributing ideas, research breakthroughs, and other answers to needs that businesses broadcast for solution.

The pervasive audience response to my pitch on the upside of data openness was, “No thanks, at least not yet.” I discovered that among major enterprises in attendance, there is still much work to be done to get social tools well understood and adopted. There seems to be an inherent need to heavily manage user behavior inside these companies via locked down systems and strict data governance. Corporations do not yet have confidence in the tools for fear of compromising confidential and proprietary data.  We had these same discussions when email was introduced to the corporations years ago… humans will be humans, and if someone wants to expose private information, they will regardless of the systems in place.

While enterprise cautiousness is real, so is their curiosity, and I welcomed many great conversations one-on-one with the crowd. More discussions to come! And I look forward to heading back to the next IBM conference with case studies under my arm.

Henry Chesbrough is considered the expert on open innovation. He’s written the book on it and regularly lectures about it. He defines open innovation as: “a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology.”

It sounds a bit confusing! We scoured the Internet and think P&G Connect and Develop defined it in a way that’s easier to grasp: “the practice of accessing externally developed intellectual property in your own business and allowing your internally developed assets and know-how to be used by others.”

The idea behind open innovation is that to keep up with the competition, companies can no longer afford to rely solely on their own internal R&D. Back in 1990, Bill Joy, of Sun Microsystems said, ‘No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.’ Much like open source, there is cooperation voluntarily undertaken by members of the public.

A quick comparison between four common terms:

Outsourcing: a task is completed by a specific body outside of company walls. example: Thoughtworks

Crowdsourcing: a task is outsourced to an undefined public either an individual, or a group. example: Netflix

Open source: a task is completed by an undefined public and openly shared. example: Linux

Open Innovation: a company chooses to share assets and know-how in exchange for gaining access to IP developed outside of company walls. example: P&G Connect and Develop

If you would like to learn more about Open Innovation, you can read Henry Chesbrough’s book, appropriately titled Open Innovation.