Innovation - There's More to it than Crowds

Having spent 2 years diving into innovation and idea management, I know there is more to innovation than getting together in a room once a year and breaking out the post-it notes.

There's also more to innovation than simply asking the crowd to provide ideas, and assuming that all of those ideas are good to great, and executable within a reasonable timeframe, or monetary investment.

Neither of these are bad, they simply aren't sufficient.

Also, having just spent several months analyzing the data that lead to our Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0 which followed on our Market IQ on Content Security - collaboration and sharing of content cannot and should not ALWAYS be out in the open.

Financial Services companies get this - that's why they are prohibited from sharing information across the "chinese firewall" between the research and sales arms - it's called collusion, not collaboration. That's why pharmaceutical companies lock away their R&D - the FDA will tear them apart, as will their competitors, if there are not tight controls on their processes (including collaboration, reporting, etc.). There's a time and place for total transparency, total secrecy, and the gray space in between.

Which is why it's all the more troubling to hear a fellow analyst jump in and declare a decade old market NEW, and a single solution as "the only enterprise class solution" when it hasn't even existed in a production state for 2 years (perhaps not 1, hard to trace from the info I'm finding).

As Dan Farber wrote about the launch of Salesforce's IdeaExchange in 2006:

"Benioff calls it an 'IdeaExchange,' an 'entirely new way to listen to customers on how to build great enterprise software, and satisfy their needs.' What’s entirely new about a blog-like site with comments and voting is somewhat of a mystery..."

That's perhaps a bit harsh, although he has a point. A shiny front-end is only part of the game, which is what troubles me about people who are obsessed with AJAX, widgets, rounded corners and cool company/product names.

In any case, see Jeremiah's "Build your own 'IdeaStorm' with UserVoice" entry, and make your own judgement.

Below is the comment I'd posted on Jeremiah's blog, with live links, and for archive purposes. Presumably the comment will pass moderation and be live on his blog shortly as well. I see that Matt Greeley, CEO of Brightidea is a bit fired up about this as well.

My comments:

The "suggestion box" approach can provide some value, and I'm now trying out UserVoice and IdeaScale as well. Interesting timing in the blogosphere on this one!

A completely open suggestion box, can however have some major downsides - even though I'm a believer in participation, openness and transparency, the stats on innovation show that focus is needed to maximize the value of these efforts.

As @DellDawn suggests, the whole management process itself is significant. Creating the front-end, vote up/down, commentary and status isn't rocket science. Nearly any blog can do that right now with a few widgets to provide ranking, combined with typical commenting and categories/tagging.

Innovation Management and Idea Management imply and end-to-end process, including the idea generation component on through filtering for duplicates, dumb ideas, things that have already been done, as well as genuine useful and relevant ideas that can be taken to market.

And I have to say, Salesforce.com is not nearly the first or the most successful "open innovation" solution.

This entire movement is born out of the Voice of the Customer movement, itself coming from marketing techniques that go back to the earliest days of focus groups. It's just at a different scale - small i innovation (incremental) rather than radical BIG I INNOVATION (brand new, never been seen before).

Some other competitors that have moved beyond the web-enabled open suggestion box: BrightIdea, Imaginatik, and MindMatters. All of which existed well before Salesforce commercialized their solution.

So, I'd say it is patently false to say that "IdeaExchange is the only enterprise class version" of anything. It's a logical extension of the Salesforce platform - pulling data in from the outside (consumers, users), and marrying to their traditional datasource, handled by marketing and sales people and processes feeding in the CRM/SFA engines. Not "the only" by a long shot.

For someone else's thoughts on the open innovation, wisdom of crowds front, see Mark Turrell's recent YouTube video which describes more of the pros/cons of various approaches. He's CEO of Imaginatik, so hardly unbiased, but he's been involved in this type of work for nearly 10 years, and can provide far more detailed anecdotes on the hard results of these systems.

The Forbes article on Suggestion Box 2.0 is a reasonable introduction to this topic as well.

I'll close with the wisdom that venture capitalists know all too well. Ideas are nothing. It's execution that counts. How do you execute on 100, 1,000 or 10,000 submitted ideas? You can't wing it, you need processes and systems in place, or you are toast.

Innovation at the enterprise-level is hard work, even when tapping the crowd. And as Henry Ford said "If I listened to my customers, I would've bred a faster horse." Suggestions frequently (but not always) require interpretation.

Comments

[Ken Stewart]

Thanks for the props, Dan. Your posts are always great brain food for me. I just wish I saw more of them ;-)