Out at the GROW2010 conference in Vancouver (not to be confused with grow events of the horticulture variety), we got to hear from Lane Becker, Co-founder and VP Strategy of Get Satisfaction talked about “well that didn’t work – startup lessons learned.”

He talked about Adaptive Path, MeasureMap (acquired by Google … Inspired GoogleAnalytics), and Get Satisfaction all with cheery cynicism.

Get Satisfaction is a peer to us – as Lane described they offer “Customer service communities online – getting customers to engage with and support each other.” Chaordix has a different focus on innovation and insight communities. Our members through crowdsourcing are collaborating with each other, but also with the company personally and via our moderation team. We generate innovation and insight for companies, where Get Satisfaction offloads work from companies, reducing customer support costs.

Early on we looked at Get Satisfaction and thought “great idea but that won’t work.” Why? Because it’s not a one way input world anymore and people contributing online expect more sometimes useful help from a non-invested stranger. They want connection, appreciation, and a near real-time response from the company on the feedback shared. Participation is the new brand loyalty.

Ta da! Turns out Get Satisfaction came to same conclusion. Now they bundle in moderation to their service.

There’s a lot we’ll all discover as online communities mature. At Chaordix we’re working hard to create the human and online expeience to trigger product co-creation, technology or research breakthroughs, open up new markets and predict future opportiny for world-leading brands we work with.

What do you think human behaviour tells us so far about how people participate and invent online, and what companies find most valuable about customer and other crowd input?

Tomorrow’s leaders may need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable

Preparing for the 4th Annual Open Innovation conference coming up April 7 – 9th, our team got talking about what we could share with Intuit, General Mills, GlaxoSmithKline, Nestle, Motorola, Merck & Co., NASA at the event that would be worth their time?

We talk to businesses every day about cross-enterprise crowdsourcing. Mostly we get asked about the how to’s and ROI of open innovation for seeking research or technology breakthroughs, new product and service ideas, testing and building world-leading brands, and anticipating consumer and citizen preference and behaviour trends.

Truthfully, these business cases for crowdsourcing are pretty common sense.

What we notice is relatively uncommon though is an understanding that crowdsourcing isn’t about getting more people participating in business as usual, it’s about how we need to change what’s usual about business to get more people contributing. Shifting to open innovation means evolving how organizations identify new strategic direction, manage knowledge and input, and form real relationships with people not just as employees. We’re not the only ones observing this – Boris Pluskowski blogged a warning “Is there a lack of innovation or originality in the innovation practice itself?”

Let me come clean here. I’m a member of the “has been” generation – the over 35 crowd. I have been caught on video ranting that I’m too set in my ways to fully embrace gmail after a decade plus on Outlook. I relate to a love of mastery versus uncertainty - big time! But as so many of us have learned – we cannot change our odds of succeeding without changing anything at all.

So when we have some time to workshop on innovation with GM, Nestle and Nasa here’s what are going to talk about:

Where is all this going? – The enterprise-wide opportunities of open innovation

- Talent scouting: How will tomorrow’s bright minds want to contribute to your organization – as employees and outsiders?
- Venture financing: How can open innovation take the risk out of choosing the up and comers most worthy of investment in your space.
- Testing: Whether you need to test a mobile app globally or a new drug with select patients, how can going open take speed and cost out of your business?

Some things to brace for and embrace:
1. Key contributors need not be employees, so you won’t control them so much, nor will you own them exclusively.
2. You may receive a multi-million dollar product or venture idea from a guy you known mostly as lapdoglover – judge the invention not the userid (remember it might be his kid or grandkid that picked the ID for him)
3. It’s not having a digital suggestion box that invites the world that’s game-changing, it’s the ability to apply crowd effort and technology to filter statistically most-likely-to-succeed ideas to the top, fast, so you can have them in market first and faster.

4. Information management and governance just went warp - If privacy and IP ownership make your fists clench, sign up for some serious meditation and laughter therapy ahead (and get involved with us in the thinktank: IBM Information Governance Council)

Hope to see you at the conference in Philadelphia. Introduce yourself!

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.

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.