Before heading home from Mobile World Congress I got to spend a day off in Barcelona over at Gaudi Park with my friend, Michelle Sklar. We got talking about how some cities seem to be more open to innovation and wondering whether Barcelona might offer some lessons to organizations looking to innovate.

First, travelling around Barcelona, we see touches of Gaudi all over. While his original work didn’t win immediate praise (his patron may have been his only fan for a while!), the city of Barcelona has really benefited from the mark Gaudi made on it. Barcelona allowed Gaudi’s almost Dr. Zeus-like buildings go up right next to highly traditional, old world architecture and that co-habitation of innovative next to conventional is something that really helps put Barcelona on the map. How do we enable this to happen inside corporations?

Even companies ready to embrace innovation are unlikely to make a wholesale switch from conservative to open overnight. One great approach is to pick one area of a company (e.g. R&D, product development, corporate responsibility, or marketing) and get a crowdsourcing initiative underway that compliments existing business but doesn’t disrupt anything that’s already profitable. For example, at Shell, they are in the business of producing and selling oil but they also have funded a project called Game Changer. According to Game Changer, the goal is to invite ideas in for increasing energy production, carbon management, energy conversion, storage and distribution and fuelling transporation. The more likely they are to say, “You know, that’s so far out there, it just might work.” The more likely they are to fund it. So they are continuing to focus on what is currently making them money, while also looking ahead to find new, sustainable ways of making money (and energy) in the future.

Gaudi’s presence in Barcelona is a reminder that what will help a company or a country stand out in the future will not be “what we’ve always done.” Finding the way to invite unexpected innovation into an organization is a vital way to lead.

Photo by: Carlos Lorenzo

We weren’t really sure of the difference either, so we consulted Wikipedia. We learned that co-creation could be seen as creating great work by standing together with those for whom the project is intended. Scholars C K Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy introduced the idea of co-creation in their 2000 Harvard Business Review article, “Co-Opting Customer Competence”. They developed their arguments further in their book The Future of Competition.

Last year, Promise Corporation published the results of a systematic review of co-creation evidence, Co-creation: new pathways to value that was co-produced with LSE Enterprise. In it they attempted to distinguish co-creation from related concepts such as crowdsourcing, mass customisation and mass collaboration by insisting on the psychoanalytical, decision-making as well as innovation roots of the concept in its intellectual evolution. Their new definition of co-creation: “co-creation is an active, creative and social process, based on collaboration between producers and users, that is initiated by the firm to generate value for customers.”

Is there a difference between crowdsourcing, open innovation, mass collaboration and co-creation? We hate to be the ones that let the cat out of the bag, but not really. Some people are more comfortable with one term over another. We think it comes down to who’s book you’ll buy.

You can’t crowdsource anything without a crowd, but what groups of people might you think about for your crowdsourcing initiatives? What qualifies as a crowd and how many people do you need to get the results you are after?

Crowds worth considering…

Your employees/stakeholders – crowdsourcing all aspects of your your business – benefit as much as possible from your employees’ knowledge and experience, ask them what you should sell, how best to operate & deliver, who to partner with, who to recruit and so on. Crowd size will be determined by the size of your company. The method is more important than numbers in this case. The key to success here is flattening your organization so that every employee feels they can contribute their ideas.

Your customers – crowdsourcing products & services - getting direct feedback from your customers on what they want to spend money on – Crowd should be made up of people who are already passionate about your brand, people who are passionate about what you sell and (if possible) a few people that think what you do is horrible. Constructive criticism is good! To make this work, you’ll want to make sure you are rewarding the people who are helping you strengthen your business.

The broad public including expert outsiders – crowdsourcing innovation – bringing qualified diverse thinkers together to assess and discover solutions has proven to lead to breakthroughs. To achieve the critical mass of hobbyists, hecklers and experts for new thinking, you’ll want a healthy sized crowd - think thousands or tens of thousands. To make this work you’ll need people with a variety of backgrounds, as everyone will approach situations differently.

Citizens at large – crowdsourcing public policy – bringing democratic practices down to a grassroots level. Crowd size is dependent on number of citizens in the jurisdiction (city, country, voting ward). You’ll want to structure things so there is a good cross section of those directly affected by the policy, not just those with a keen interest in being politically active.

Photo courtesy: WiggyToo