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Innovation Newsletter from OVO
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Conversations about Innovation
June 2009 - Vol 3, Issue 8
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Continuing in the recent "theme" concept, we'd like to turn this month to the topic of idea generation. Your noted correspondent had the opportunity to host a workshop on crowdsourcing recently with a number of individuals from Dell, Cisco and IBM. We'll examine the strengths and weaknesses of idea generation and evaluation using Crowdsourcing, and look at some of the different approaches. Additionally, we've had a chance to chat with Dwayne Spradlin, CEO of Innocentive, so we have some of his impressions of Crowdsourcing as well.

Next we'll consider the traditional brainstorm - that workhorse of idea generation - to determine how your team can run more effective idea generation sessions.

Finally we'll consider a few other approaches and give a shout-out to a couple of authors and inventors who have created some tools and techniques that you should consider.

In this issue we highlight our innovation training experience and offerings. It's never too early to start training your management team and innovation team!

The goal: to convince you and yours to get out there, to generate ideas using all the tools at your disposal. Sure you've got ideas, but do you have the best ones you can create, and do you have ideas in the product or service areas you need the most?

We'd like to know your thoughts about the innovation space. What topics are of most importance to you? What information can we provide to help you accomplish your goals? Please feel free to contact us as we continue to bring you some of the best commentary on the innovation space.

What does the crowd know?

Recently OVO was asked to moderate a workshop on Crowdsourcing and idea generation. The goal was to educate and inform a PDMA chapter on the topic and how and when to use Crowdsourcing and Wisdom of Crowds as tools in the innovation process. I was fortunate to have introductions to individuals who run Dell's IdeaStorm application, as well as team members from IBM's Idea Jam team and Cisco's social networking team as panel members, and a professor from UNC's business school to help set the stage and participate in Q&A.

As you might expect with such an august line up, I think we all learned a lot in the process, which I'll share with you below.

Types of Crowdsourcing

As a group we decided that there are a number of categories or "types" of crowdsourcing. Dell's Ideastorm represents an "open suggestion" model - there's no specific challenge or opportunity to respond to and anyone can participate. IBM's Idea Jams are usually more targeted - a specific "challenge" is issued, usually to a targeted audience. Cisco's communities and social networks organize by topic or technology, but are open to anyone within that spectrum. Clearly there are other options, but the "typology" suggests that most crowdsourcing attempts are either open (open to anyone) or closed (open to invited participants) and are either suggestive (any idea is welcome, no issue or challenge is identified) or directed ( a specific issue or challenge is provided). This typology also suggest where and when these tools and techniques can be applied.

A challenge or campaign like Dell's IdeaStorm or Starbuck's MyStarBucks Idea can be launched at any time and can be a link off of the corporate website. This provides the means for customers to provide ideas to the company about new products and services. These campaigns offer an ongoing set of ideas that are generated by consumers and allow consumers to rank or evaluate ideas (Wisdom of Crowds). Since there is little governance to the type of idea or challenge, consumers can enter literally anything they choose to. At Dell, consumers have generated over 12,000 ideas and at least 300 of those have been implemented in new products and services. Yet a quick glance will reveal the dimensions of the opportunity - 12,000 ideas is a lot to consider. Open suggestion campaigns can generate a LOT of ideas, and those ideas usually represent a wide range of solutions and opinions.

Narrowing the scope

IBM's Idea Jams provide a slightly more focused discussion and idea generation vehicle. These Jams or campaigns are focused around a key topic, opportunity or issue that the people who submit ideas are expected to help solve. In most cases, the population responding to a campaign is invited and often is prepared in advance to understand the issue or challenge. While fewer ideas are generated than in an open model, they ideas are usually more pertinent and more easily evaluated. However, campaigns usually have a short life, only a few weeks at most, so a firm interested in constantly capturing ideas needs to develop a list of Jams or Campaigns in order to keep the energy up around this technique.

Cisco uses a slightly different model, less focused on idea generation but achieving the same goals. In their case Cisco is using social networking, discussion forums and communities to hatch new ideas. These communities allow people of similar interests to gather and discuss ideas or challenges. While not invitational, the communities are self-selecting so a smaller group attends, usually one with an interest in a specific product or technology.

Contests

A subset or special case of the directed/open campaign is a contest, in which participants are provided with a very specific problem or issue, and are encouraged to submit very detailed responses. One response is chosen and identified as the "winner". Innocentive, a firm in the consumer goods and pharma space, is a representative firm using contests to find solutions to seemingly intractable problems. Innocentive has been employing a contest model for quite some time with very good results, especially for technical or scientific challenges.

I was fortunate to spend an hour on the phone with Dwayne Spradlin, the CEO of Innocentive, who gave me more insights into the direction of his firm and the products and services they offer. You can read more about that discussion on the Innovate on Purpose blogsite.

Strengths and Weaknesses

There are a number of reasons to consider Crowdsourcing when seeking new ideas:
  1. A crowdsourcing event demonstrates that your firm is listening to its customers
  2. Volume and range of ideas is much larger than if the team brainstorms internally
  3. There's a constant supply of ideas over time
  4. You can gain a better sense of what is important to customers
  5. You'll gain ideas your team would have never created

With that said, there are several key factors to consider. First, who owns the intellectual property? It can be difficult to determine whether or not an idea submitted "over the transom" is really already documented and eagerly defended by another firm. Second, do you want to expose all of your inbound ideas to a broad group? Every idea submitted to IdeaStorm is visible to the entire group of participants. Finally, it can be difficult for really radical or disruptive ideas to rise to the top in these systems, since a crowd may not recognize or believe the firm will implement something far from the ordinary. Our rule of thumb is that it becomes increasingly difficult to generate and identify radical or disruptive ideas once the participating team expands beyond seven or eight people, so you can bet we have our concerns about disruptive innovation happening in a crowdsourcing environment.

Submitters, Commenters and Lurkers

Another rule of thumb - invite a lot of people to any idea generation session. From experience across these firms as well as our own ideation experience, you can expect about 10% of the people you invite to submit an idea, about 5% to comment on an idea and about 1% to submit more than one idea. Many people are content to review the ideas and "lurk" in the background without entering ideas. This may be because their ideas were already entered by someone else, or they don't believe they have many ideas, or that they are reserving their ideas for another venue. However, in a two week campaign with 500 or 600 people involved, it's not unusual to generate 400 ideas. Our rules of thumb suggest that the vast majority of those ideas come from between 40 and 60 people. The hard part is to know which people will be the generation machines, so, rather than try to guess, invite a lot of people to any crowdsourcing event.

Wisdom of Crowds

We also spent some time talking about the use of "Wisdom of Crowds" or using crowds to rank, prioritize or evaluate ideas. This can be done through a voting mechanism, a ranking mechanism or through promotion like Digg where people give "thumbs up" to a story or concept. Many of us already participate in Wisdom of Crowds ranking through book or music reviews on Amazon (one to five star ranking), and many of us have voted on concepts or ideas in many situations.

Both Dell and IBM in their Jam program use Wisdom of Crowds for some basic idea ranking. Dell allows the users of IdeaStorm to "promote" ideas while the Idea Jam process allows for voting. While the insights from the crowd are important, it is also important to point out that many organizations that use Wisdom of Crowds also conduct a separate review of ideas, to identify ideas the crowd ignored. Typically this happens to ideas that seem too disruptive or radical for the crowd to accept. Again, Wisdom of Crowds, like Crowdsourcing, can overlook disruptive or radical ideas.

Conclusion

There are a number of good reasons to use the "crowd" to generate ideas (as in the case of IdeaStorm or Idea Jams) or offer solutions to specific problems or challenges (as in the case of Innocentive). Before using these methods, however, it is critical that you understand the strengths and weaknesses of the approach. Crowds are good at generating ideas that your team may not have come up with or even considered, but often crowds aren't so great at selecting really innovative or disruptive ideas. Be prepared for a deluge if you have an interesting problem or topic, so you'll need to have a methodology in place to manage the ideas. Crowds are fickle, so don't ask for ideas and then fail to tell the crowds how you used their ideas.
Familiarity breeds contempt

When we work with clients, inevitably we'll find ourselves in a situation where we need to generate ideas. To many people, this presents a quandary. Everyone understands that brainstorming should be a top choice to help generate ideas, yet no one ever seems enthusiastic about the choice. Something like most of my dates to prom - a selection, but never an enticing one.

When asked, most clients will admit that they have been through numerous brainstorming sessions, and most will complain that they find them ineffective, tedious or never on point. Our goal in this section of the newsletter is to tell you why that is so, and how to change the perception.

Good brainstorming is good meeting

A good brainstorm happens when preparation, the right atmosphere, a good agenda, a clear outcome and follow up actions all meet a prepared and engaged group of participants. If that sounds like the recipe for a good meeting - it is. Brainstorming is a unique type of meeting, and most meetings are successful or unsuccessful based on just a few ingredients - planning, agenda, topics and leadership. If your team can get these right, then it can become much better at idea generation using brainstorming - in fact, you may be surprised how much more effective your teams can be.

Planning

Planning is often the most overlooked aspect of a brainstorm. Usually the team is quickly gathered together, with little preparation or planning and asked to generate ideas about an unclear issue or challenge. Planning the event, just as you would any other important meeting, will make the brainstorming more effective by identifying the key challenges or issues, giving the participants time to think about the issues before arriving at the brainstorming, and establishing an agenda for the event. Any successful meeting is a well-planned meeting, and any successful brainstorm is well-planned as well.

A well-planned meeting is evident based on the agenda, the communication prior to the event and the intent and proposed outcomes. Good planning communicates to the participants the level of interest and focus they should have for the brainstorm.

Clear Topics and Goals

Just as planning is important, it is important to clearly define and articulate the problem, challenge or opportunity that you are asking the team to solve, and ensure everyone is on the "same page". Much frustration about brainstorming exists because a lot of the time budgeted for idea generation is taken up working to ensure everyone agrees on the outlines of the opportunity or challenge, so much time is spent reaching agreement rather than generating ideas. A clearly defined, well scoped problem definition or opportunity statement can help the idea generators reach agreement quickly, and can focus and frame their efforts.

Without a well-defined scope, teams spin their wheels trying to identify the right problem to solve. This becomes frustrating for the team and ultimately leads to an incomplete or unsuccessful idea generation session.

Leadership

Let's face it, not everyone is great at generating ideas on the fly, and few people are really good at facilitating a brainstorming session. Good facilitators can make an average team much more effective, while poor facilitators can wreck even an imaginative team. What makes a good facilitator?
  1. Establishes a clear agenda
  2. Establishes the ground rules and "limits" if any to the thinking
  3. Enforces the "rules"
  4. Encourages the reticent
  5. Moderates the talkers
  6. Asks the provocative or "stupid" question
  7. Keeps the team focused and on track
  8. Works to the team's interest, not his/her own
  9. Is unbiased and seeks the best answers

What happens too often is that the facilitator is the person who (1) arranged the brainstorm and has a vested interest in the outcome, and steers the team toward specific ideas or conclusions, or (2) does not manage the participants well and allows one or two participants to dominate the discussion.

A good facilitator can make a poorly designed brainstorm a success, while a poor facilitator can impede a very creative group of brainstomers. Using a "third party" - whether that's someone from another group or a consultant to facilitate a brainstorm is usually a wise choice.

Specific Followup

The final piece of a successful brainstorm is specific, timely action on the ideas generated. Too often, the ideas are captured and then nothing happens to the ideas, so the time was not used effectively. We advocate building a high level project plan, assigning ideas to specific individuals with follow up activities planned in the next 90 days. If your team can't identify or assign those actions, either your ideas aren't specific enough or there's not enough "buy-in" to take action on the ideas.

Conclusion

Brainstorming can be an exceptionally effective idea generation device, if your team will spend the time necessary to plan the event and identify facilitators who demonstrate the skills we've defined above. It's time to dust off this old warhorse and exercise it the way it was meant to be used.
Exploring other idea generation methods

Beyond brainstorming, there are a number of other idea generation and creativity tools you can use alone, or with a team to generate ideas. If brainstorming doesn't seem too effective or perhaps there's resistance to that approach, or you just want to change gears, try out some of these methods when you need to generate ideas.

Brainwriting

Brainwriting is similar to brainstorming, in that it can be done "live" and in a group, but the difference is that participants write down their ideas rather than shout them out. Generally speaking, the facilitator will ask everyone to write down their top five or six ideas, then pass their list to the person to their right. Each person then receives a partial list of ideas from the person on their left, and reads those ideas. Then, the recipient can add new ideas to the list, or build on the ideas that are already on the page. This process generally happens two or three times before many of the initial ideas are exhausted.

Brainwriting works well if you have a group that tends to be more contemplative and less successful or willing to shout out ideas. It generates more ideas in a shorter amount of time, but with less discussion, Building on ideas can be difficult since the team does not become aware of an idea at the same time. Brainwriting can be used when the team is face to face, or when the team is distributed, using a discussion forum or blog-like application.

Analogies

A great way to generate ideas is to seek analogies from similar problems or challenges that have been solved in other markets or industries. For example, the issue of the underbanked in the banking industry is very similar to the issue of the underinsured in the insurance industry. What can one industry learn from the other? How can we draw analogies to other solutions in other industries? In nature?

Mind Mapping

Many idea generators prefer a visual approach to generating ideas rather than a verbal or list approach, so Mind Mapping has become a significant tool in the idea generator's arsenal. While mind mapping has many different approaches and connotations, at it's core the concept is about documenting with pictures, words, links and graphics the ideas that exist in a person's or team's collective brains.

I've seen mind mapping used effectively in a large group setting when an artist or a person on the team with some artistic skill documents a discussion by drawing images of the discussion in real time. Alternatively I've seen individuals generate and organize ideas effectively using Mind Maps created in software built specifically for mind mapping. MindJet is probably the leader in the space for mind mapping software.

"Bugs Me" list

Keeping a journal of things that don't work well, or don't work as you expect them to work, or things that "bug" you is often a good jumping off point for idea generation. If you can start from a clear problem or point of failure and leap to solutions for these failures, you can quickly generate ideas. Many innovation firms advocate using a "bugs me" list or innovation journal to capture challenges or ideas all the time.

Conclusion

These are just a few of the ways we've worked with clients to generate ideas beyond traditional brainstorming techniques. In addition, I have to recommend a few books that we believe are top notch from a creativity and idea generation perspective, to further your education and idea generation capabilities:
  1. A Whack on the side of the Head by Roger von Oech
  2. Group Genius by Keith Sawyer
  3. Think Better by Tim Hurson

Check out these books, and our website to find even more ways to generate ideas.
Training your innovators

OVO offers a full range of training options to train your innovation team, an innovation project team, new managers or executives who need an introduction to innovation methods and tools and others in your organization.

We've developed customized training programs for our clients and offer "off the shelf" packaged curriculum that can be modified and tailored to your needs. The training can be delivered online or in person, depending on the needs of your team.

Idea Generation

We have lead a number of training programs to help organizations improve their ability to generate ideas, using brainstorming, CrowdSourcing and other idea generation techniques. In addition, our training focuses on the "best practices" around idea generation, including the important planning and preparation, and the role of the moderator or facilitator of a brainstorming session.

Idea Advocates

OVO offers a packaged training program to train "innovation advocates" - people who remain in their respective roles but receive training in various innovation tools. Think of the approach as a "green belt" in innovation, similar to the Six Sigma green and black belts for continuous improvement. We believe it is important to have a small, central innovation team, surrounded by innovation advocates who receive training in innovation tools but who work in "regular" positions in the organization. In that way they can identify opportunities for innovation, apply the appropriate tools and act as a bridge to an innovation team as necessary.

If you'd like to discuss how OVO can work with you to improve your innovation strategies, ideation sessions, innovation processes or software, contact us today at our website or (919) 844-5644 x789.

If you have a topic you'd like to see us cover or a question you'd like to have us address, please let us know via the website above.

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Sincerely,
Jeffrey Phillips
OVO