We all value those times when we can slip away from our desk, from the computer or phone and just simply step outside.

Some do this because of a necessity of topping up their nicotine levels or finding a few moments for having a chat, others just simply want to step away, relax a little and freshen up.

Another reason to get out of the office is when it comes to thinking differently within the business, going out  to seek out different, often radically new ideas. This offers the chance of seeing something completely differently, by being simply aware and open to new possibilities, detaching yourself from your own (comfortable) environment .

Steve Blank has a famous rallying cry of “get out of the building” as part of the Customer Development Manifesto, to turn the initial hypothesis into real customer needs through gathering hard customer data, outside your office, validating it to the real world outside

By applying a set of development principles where combining rapid iteration, making constant pivots, becomes central to a business model’s customer discovery and validation as facts, hard valuable ones, as these are often only found where customers live and you must go there repeatedly to achieve those minimal viable products that validate your assumptions.

How often do we come up against a problem or challenge that can’t be resolved by sitting at our desk, we have to go and look elsewhere? The trouble is we tend to go to the familiar places; those tried and tested norms, the expected answers that have been well developed as our industry solutions and established as the features our customers expect. We immerse ourselves in our category as we know it as the natural place to start.

Yet we are missing a huge amount if we simply stop there and apply the common solution, we miss the real chance to challenge and deliver solutions that can become game-changers or can shift customer perspectives and needs in uniquely different ways.

Going cross-industry

Have you noticed nothing seems to stand alone today; it is now more connected, more dependent on others. More and more companies are breaking out of their industry box, forming radically different business models, delivering products, services and processes all seen outside their industry and found they can be applied within theirs.

Industry borders are blurring, there are increasingly smaller, agile and highly disruptive companies working to change the existing into the new preferred. Established players that continue to choose the familiar are at increasing risk of missing out.

The whole concept of cross-industry is to seek out new ideas

Cross-industry investigations develop our abilities to ask different questions, combining elements that might not be expected without a more open mind, finding new innovation patterns and then testing concepts through new customer validation techniques such as Steve Blank’s customer development process. Cross-industry discovery is growing in its importance to innovating differently.

Take a look at these examples at http://www.crossindustryinnovation.com/15-examples/ showing some clever ways to jump-start your thinking by drawing analogies and transferring approaches between contexts, beyond the borders of your own industry, sector, area or domain.

We need to grow our ‘art’ of questioning far more today. Questioning is becoming a strategic asset, just take a look at these Thirty What-If Questions to rethink your future.

The art of this questioning is constantly asking the “why, what if and how” so as you can begin to discover the applicable innovation pattern that can be transferred from another industry into yours for a radically different product, service or process.

There is a really excellent book “Not Invented Here- Cross Industry Innovation” written by Ramon Vulling and Marc Heleven that came out in May 2015, and to support this, they have a dedicated website where you can find a terrific reference site that they have compiled to help you jump start your cross-industry innovation efforts, to enhance your products/services, processes, business models, strategy & culture. Enjoy the ride!

Their 101 Cross Industry Super-Sites is superb to delve into and be inspired and amazed at all the approaches of cross-industry approaches moving from one industry to another.

The ability to work abstractly

Can we separate our established thinking thought from concrete realities, specific objects, or actual instances and suspend judgement and seek out the novel, different connections? It is the power of seeing the distinct differences in innovation possibility that can translate into that radically different product, service or process, finding the applicable innovation pattern that can be applied to your industry. Developing the art of always posing the question of “what this could become?” requires a new lens of perceived thought.

It is applying a conceptual or a more theoretical approach, having an open mind to see patterns and connections not normally applied within your industry but can become radically different to explore.

Then in turning these into a hypothesis that moves this idea into the customer validation process and then you can unleash your lean management process of building prototypes, experiments and iteration, to take this “out of the building” for that empirical build and customer testing built on constant validation and testing, blending radically different ideas with customer needs.

Often this is the toughest work as you have to strive to overcome the mentality of “not invented here, so it won’t work for us”. Turning “yes but”….into “yes and” is hard. Changing established perceptions is extremely hard but potentially very rewarding. It can give you a real competitive advantage by translating what you learnt in applying analogies to solutions that solve your customer problems.

Begin your journey by simply just stepping outside

The crucial need when you begin this journey of “just stepping outside” is knowing what the innovation question or challenge you are trying to solve is really about. Do not mistake this with simply looking to extend your existing product, this is asking about innovation that can be radically different:

• What are the main issues your customers would love to be resolved?
• Can you list the existing best practice, clarify its desired effects but does it meet the real needs?
• What inspirations can you glean from another industry to arrive at a “next practice” that gets closer to the real needs?

So as you search across industry you are framing the questions into “how do we”: adapt, enrich, customise, take one element and apply this, expand, learn, experiment, modify, fuse, blend or play with that alters our thinking. It is like knowledge building blocks (think Lego) that connect together.

There are so many examples on this cross-industry site to get the ‘juices flowing’. One I had not come across was in the use of the Ten Types of Innovation, explained recently in the post Using the Ten Types of Innovation Framework by building up a terrific tactics overview produced here as a wallchart that lends itself to cross-industry questioning and potential application framing.

Finally, we have to allow time to explore Micro, Macro and Mega Trends

There are so many trends to tap into and explore by having this questioning hat on. If you can lay your hands onto a trends map that could inspire you so much the better? Just reflect on how the digital culture, globalisation, individualism, rising aspirations (and deepening discontent), our access to information, urbanisation, health and wellness, climate change and corporate leadership are all triggering points for making a change in something we can influence.

We all need to be constantly seeking ideas from these trends, many can often come from exploring cross-industry examples By becoming aware through a more enquiring mind, might allow us to see its applicability to our situation or push our own thoughts even further.

Stepping out of your own (narrow) industry perspective can allow you to see with very different eyes  on how others are tapping into these changes and seeing new possibilities and this can lead to cross-collaboration opportunities or the ability to reach out, across an industry, exchange and explore thoughts that can be potentially applied back in your business with a part detachment, part connecting mindset.

Summary

At a time when companies need more radical and game-changing innovation, so as to be able to meet the challenges facing them, one of chasing growth, fending off increased competition and having industry borders increasingly merge, we need to find ways to jump-start our innovation efforts in radically different ways.

By drawing analogies and transferring novel approaches gained in searching across different industries and then by placing these into the specific context of your customer needs we can begin to develop new products, services and processes differently. This can be achieved by making those different connections and constantly be asking questions to frame and explore other industry solutions into ones that have real potential to your specific needs.

It is working towards a “next practice” by breaking existing patterns and norms that can radically alter the thinking and change the game. By stepping out into the unknown and exploring in places you usually would not have been, investigating to solve your problems, part of this discovery comes from giving increasing attention to cross-industry innovation practices.Many unexpected ideas can be applied to your solutions, ones that might become game-changers or offer radically different solutions that can also dovetail into delivering on those often initially hidden customer needs.

Your “just stepping outside” in your thinking and exploring may be the beginning of a real game-changer and might take a little more of your time being away from your desk and it might be highly valued that you did take the time in new products, services and processes.

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Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their agreement, I have added this to my own site.

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The post Getting out of the Building, Going Cross-Industry for Seeking Out Radical Ideas first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The community is encouraged to form, lead and build, taking ideas and thinking onto discovery journeys, seeking out and building on each other’s contributions.

The individual building blocks (like Lego) connect into a collective whole, that piece together, progressively being combined, to solve a problem, to frame something that leads to an answer of meeting the challenge initially set up.

The overriding need is to release the forces within the crowd, by seeking out and gaining their engagement and connection as something ‘they’ believe they can contribute into; as here lies the discovery of many, combining and ‘feeding off’ of each other, to change the existing into the preferred.

This is the third post on crowdsourcing that might offer some general background statements. Part one is here and part two is here.

Crowdsourcing can be powerful if harnessed well.

After a fairly detailed exploratory working through crowdsourcing in this mini-series, I wanted to offer my ‘take’, to help our thinking though in formulating clearer positions in this, to see its increasing value as contributing into an innovation management system.

Crowdsourcing does offer increasing value as a contributor into our innovation management system. It can open up a real rich potential of tapping into diverse opinions that were difficult to reach in the past. Yet it does, from my perspective, need thoughtfully working through in its application and the expected end results, as each will challenge the initial assumptions and that is exactly what you will be looking for, challenging the accepted knowns and revealing the many unknowns.

Crowdsourcing can become potentially part of your heavy-armoury for innovation discovery, a rich place to seek out better innovation, often radical solutions.

In what ways?

Crowdsourcing is allowing diverse communities to come together.

Crowdsourcing is allowing broader groups of people to come together, to gather around a challenge or problem and through the collective diversity of insights, experience or suggestions, offer solutions Without this collective wisdom it often would not be as possible to discover or piece together radically different answer or crack complex problems or determine pathways that would have remained undiscovered without this broad range of expertise and diversity of knowledge available through the use of our connected webs.

Today we are seeing a significant movement in crowdsourcing by the fact that many communities are forming through finding the independent voice, by collectively working on issues that would not have been as possible without  these crowdsourcing platforms. Today there is a growing participation happening on-line, forming around challenges, ideas, projects, non-profits, people and important social and business issues.

They are truly organic, feeding off all the contributions.

The use of crowdsourcing is growing as a vital part of discovering innovation that can transform through the tapping into a community and leverage their combined thinking, feeding off and building from each other.

The potential for discovering something radically different, solving a complex problem or simply collecting a rich array of potential innovation solutions can be discovered using crowdsourcing. It offers an exciting future, managed well.

The great thing is you (each of us participating) are the ones performing, participating and delivering your ideas, thoughts, solutions into a community of others wanting to build from this diverse thinking to contribute to the challenge offered. You are making a contribution that can potentially build into something radically different or determine a new path to explore. Participation and contribution become highly valued.

Others then begin to react to your contribution, they start reacting, responding, picking up on this surge of creative energy. Collectively you combine to begin to build something that answers a specific problem. It lets all of us in, to participate and contribute.

Getting to this point needs a lot of organising to set the scene, to provide the organisers with the connections, to see the possibilities, to allow ideas and suggestions to simply ‘flow’ and build.

Knowing what we are getting into becomes critical to want to jump in and take part

Designing the challenge becomes critical. We need to always know or believe it is crowd-worthy. It is these crowd-worthy challenges which trigger us into action.

It needs a significant thinking through if you want to delve into a real challenge; it can equally be a challenge that is simply one to ‘put out there’ to gather and illicit ‘quick’ opinions. Much of what we are doing is blurring and crowdsourcing is attempting to pick this apart to help.

Crowdsourcing comes in multiple guises

It took me some time to make these connections but these are all seeking out a digital crowd engagement. Crowdsourcing can be under social fundraising, collaborative consumption, customer co-creation, peer-to-peer economy, collective intelligence, open innovation and crowdfunding to name some, not all. They all are working within the crowd economy.

Dealing in the Crowd has become so fragmented, is this healthy or is it a present constraint?

The urgent need is to try to bring some organisation into the variables offered under the broad crowd umbrella. It can be a real labyrinth of working out what you are trying to achieve, knowing where to go to mount your crowdsourcing challenge and who to work with to believe you have the ‘best’ and most experienced platform that can manage it. There is so many ‘crowd’ platforms set around tasks, content, innovation, funding, learning, testing, media exploration, cause-related, design, competitions, services, property, lending / loans, citizen engagement and travel.

There is a directory of crowdsourcing that becomes an essential ‘go to’ place early on to get your bearings on what is out there and can help shape your thinking and needs.  It seems like there are new crowdfunding platforms launching literally every day, so establishing that your choice does have the ‘right’ track record, has been around long enough to build traction and a good reputation, becomes a major task in itself. Compare and contrast and read the case histories.

Ones that spring out for me as leading the ‘crowd pack’ are Kickstarter, Rockethub, Patreon, Peerbackers, Indiegogo, Gofundme as well as Crowdcast,  Quirky, Threadless and Mob4Hire.

Also, let us not forget Airbnb operates in this crowd economy. It is a very crowded (excuse the pun) and difficult place to start and figure out who to partner with. Finding the right partner to crowdsource with can clearly make or break any initiative so this validating needs to be undertaken well.

For me, Crowdsourcing can be beneficial in the following ways:

1. It can deliver an awareness and buzz that provides positive publicity and value to you.
2. It can qualify and test emerging ideas and the thinking through early enough to gain significant improvements or recognition that they lack scale appeal.
3. It can simply be a primary source of engagement with the public and stakeholders and influencers to receive invaluable feedback and confidence of message, direction, contribution and value.
4. It ‘puts out there’ crowd-based challenges that bring to the surface fresh insights and raises alternatives to adopting and adapting within your innovation activity.
5. It can ‘solve’ problems from those normal non-traditional sources that it would be hard to reach and engage without a higher level of commitment.
6. You can keep crowdsourcing specifically for worthy causes that build social responsibility identification and contribution.
7. Make it a core part of your innovation where you are seeking out breakthrough new innovations that can radically challenge and alter existing thinking.
8. You can use it for launching and evaluating a product / service / idea or news-worthy event.
9. It can help drive overall spend efficiencies and saving costs through obtaining feedback and suggestions on improvements of service and seeking out comparable approaches the crowd is more likely to be aware of.
10. It allows participates to engage, seek dialogue and have conversations that build a sense of identity and common purpose.

Crowdsourcing is straddling so much today but it can offer a really broad potential for ‘finding’ innovation

It needs recognition of the real potential in crowdsourcing, when structured and formed well can be highly valuable and part of our learning journey to solving problems and challenges that might not be solved by internal means alone.

The overcoming of both risk and depth of understanding of what you are trying to achieve in its use is hard work to work through. So is the art of engagement with the crowd.

The way forward: building, testing, probing, gaining experience and community understanding

I clearly would recommend you can build from small pilots towards larger scale, allowing those around to learn, value and appreciate the contribution that crowdsourcing can give us as a rich source of fresh ideas from broad or targeted communities, not easily obtained by any other means.

In Summary

“Crowdsourcing is probing the experience economy, wanting to understand authenticity, explore individual views, pushing to form new connections, curate and filter lots of different stuff. Much of what we are doing is blurring and crowdsourcing is attempting to pick this apart to help”.

Each crowd occasion will be different, that is its value, in attracting a highly diverse, hard to reach diversity to be drawn out of different communities, that needs encouraging in ways to contribute, sensing their voices are wanting to be heard and then being valued.

This tapping in and building on the diversity of thinking gives huge potential to solving so many different issues and challenges, for those willing to put in the organising commitment and who want to seek out the hidden value that lies within the crowd, in break-through ways.

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Publishing note:  This blog post was part of one originally written on behalf of Hype and with their agreement, I have added this to my own site as well, separating it into different thoughts adding some revisions and further reflection.

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The post The Growing Value in that Crowd- Encourage it Out. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Crowdsourcing does have a real potential in my mind but does seem to have some formidable issues to work through, to be well understood and managed.

Partnering with experts in this field will help overcome many of these barriers or at least have reassuring suggestions for resolving them. Let’s take a look at some of these here in this post.

Certainly, I think over time we will learn what works for us and what becomes leading practice, so we can become a lot clearer on crowdsourcing position and value to us, within our context, terms and circumstances.

That is why it will be really hard to cite ‘best practice’ as each crowdsourcing challenge will need different inputs and will yield very different outcomes for each unique challenge or problem raised.

Continuing with my exploring crowdsourcing. Part one is here. Within this second post, I want to offer some different thoughts to work through around the issues and concerns that came out in my researching the subject. There is a part three coming out in a few days to finish this mini-series off.

Let’s start here by raising some of the biggest concerns you might have over crowdsourcing?

• Will crowdsourcing provide predictable outcomes? No, everything you do to make for a good result still might not eventually deliver on this for all the preparation work you put in. You are literally in the hands of the ‘crowd’ and how they take to it or not.
• The management time to oversee crowd efforts will seemingly seem excessive at times but then you strike “pay dirt” and then suddenly it all seems worthwhile. Getting this clear in its resource needs and establishing the expectations needs working on, so you minimise pushback
• You may seem to get great answers but these might only come from a narrow representation of the population and they can miscue your results, if not spotted. Finding a way to counter this needs thinking through.
• The reactions between those placing the challenge and the crowd can turn from friendly to hostile if the management of the flow and continued acknowledgement and recognition of the contributions are not managed thoughtfully and given a constant ‘reality check’ back to the challenge to keep it always on scope, or adjusted to reflect the new thinking.
• Sometimes a crowdsourcing problem is hijacked by a party with a cause, or it becomes more of a competition between selected individuals that influence and shape the debate. You need to intervene and sometimes be firm in imaginative ways to allow other voices to be heard and not dampened down.
• The ability to build a greater collaboration gets ‘beaten’ back by these strongly held views that overshadow the other voices you are wanting here. Seek out all possible views, encourage diversity.
• How do you deal with potential plagiarism, intellectual property rights or those deliberately seeking funds or engagement for their means? Is there an opportunity for scandal or a potential for fraud? Be alert to these and have some of your own experts readily on hand to refer these and clarify. This is a very tricky area to handle.

You at least do need some awareness of these traps and have some part answer too in preparation, as they can come at you fast and furious or in stealth mode that catches you unaware.

Each of these mentioned above can be potential pitfalls that might put many off but this is a significant part of why partnering with established crowdsourcing platforms can help avoid these or resolve them.

Selecting good partners to help you with managing crowdsourcing becomes important

Just simply selecting a partner to help you in hosting, assisting and providing different services can be daunting but don’t let that put you off. You can research the choices fairly well, prior any engagement with a little researching.

With the good partners, you certainly can separate their rhetoric from their strengths by judging how they are building an increasing “governance of understanding”. They are working constantly on rules, language, technology, outreach, listening, content provision and focus intent, through a robust platform and analytical ability.

Those partners are emerging stronger as crowdsourcing grows to be a partner of choice, the venue the crowd wants to ‘surge’ towards as they sense and feel the platform helps them and the contracting parties genuinely wanting to extract the best out of the crowd by addressing the pitfalls and showing the ways they have resolved these in their emerging experiences and practices.

How are you thinking through a crowdsourcing initiative?

There is a host of issues to think through. Some of these are real challenges but you need some ‘reasonable’ semblance of understanding around these often ‘knotty’ issues:

• Resource Focus – not being able to align resources, culture and systems to drive interest.
• Technology – not having the right platform to host the activity or the bandwidth, to handle the flows both in and then back out then lacking a clear analytical capability to manage and build from this as a  set of data insights.
• Listening – not listening enough, not paying consistent attention but staying tuned-out and lacking the ability to respond, and build quickly enough on a promising idea to draw out more contributions from the community.
• Content – not providing frequent and interesting content to build, feed off and interact with. Not clarifying or framing enough at the beginning or along the way.
• Constrained Outreach – not broad enough, constrained in resources, feedback or reaction so it quickly ‘dies’ as it is not ‘dynamic’ enough to gain the attention and attract a representative crowd so the result delivers poor value back.
• Lacking a crowdsourcing culture – without dedicated passion within the group that is there driving the effort, or lacking the knowledge to fuel and build from incoming knowledge ‘just enough’ to build and connect this further stops the build. A climate of trust comes from this dedication and empowerment, and openly engaging within communities.
• Lacking community management – which has to span initla resourcing, hosting, engagement, dialogues, responding to conversations at different peak and lull periods requires a strong resource commitment plan.
• Rules and Governance that are not strong enough in their guidelines for all within the community to understand where the lines are and might become crossed. Or having experience in handling fast flowing legal, regulatory and management oversight issues, or simply knowing when to quickly refer these to those that can decide.
• A lack of comprehensive tools – to provide all the necessary features to attract, tap into depth and enable customer engagement and feeling of contributions being read, and actively worked upon.

Then you have the internal ones to think through

How are you going to attract in the broader management understanding within your organisation in accepting this activity to achieve a greater engagement through crowdsourcing techniques to tap into the wisdom that lies within?

For instance, before you mount any internal crowdsourcing you need to have thought through different issues to have some good answers to some of the potential pitfalls or of barriers that might be raised on crowdsourcing:

• Not being able to internalize the benefits and bring those inside the organisation to yield a tangible ‘commercial’ or problem solved, the ideas remain just simply ideas.
• The challenge although intellectually interesting, lacks the strategic focus that ties this to solving the business or social need specifically.
• The lack of incentives both to those participating and in rewarding for the results ‘kills’ the end result.
• Poor measurements that were unable to track, monitor and access success as the return on the investment limit any momentum going forward.
• In all your determination to structure the crowd activity, you can overlook that important part of a sense of identity. You fail to present your business in a real, human, personable and trustworthy way and leave it too vague and open enough, to not ‘draw-in’ as you would have liked.

Reading these I am sure it seems a daunting list but getting some sense or feeling towards each of these allows for a stronger result.

Then, we have the internal obstacles to overcome or address

They include:

1. Will the organisation adopt crowdsourcing as valuable to have? What silo’s of ‘threat’ need addressing?
2. Will there really be enough staff to manage this and all the demands placed on them to be engaged, open and responsive to those outside contributing in?
3. The senior managers that worry over a possible set of perceived risks, moving reluctantly from a status quo or a sense of losing control. How do you address these real concerns?
4. Suddenly having challenges or problems moving from the inside to the outside has to be managed, will the company culture accept this desire to be open enough on issues, challenges or problems it wants to find solutions to without ‘tipping its hat’ to the competition?
5. A sudden flow of ideas coming in will mean more legal, regulatory and management engagement than normal as the crowd may expect a fast reaction, and they won’t recognise the internal hurdles or considerations involved. This becomes part of crowd management.
6. The sudden availability of technical skills or expertise, ready for a good honest dialogue often puts those experts on the spot, this needs handling carefully.
7. Many crowdsourcing initiatives fail, you need to internally gain acceptance that this can happen and certainly will. You need to condition acceptance if they appreciate the real potential of the “raw” value potential. It is like VC investing, one big win dwarfs the losses of many promising ideas that did not make it but you needed seeding to try.

Launching a crowd initiative can have significant ‘added’ benefits

With all the obstacles, barriers and issues presented here, it might make you wonder if crowdsourcing is worth the effort. Clearly, crowdsourcing is not for everyone. Diving straight in might seem a great idea but the gradual learning approach by building scale and size in the challenge or problem to solve is a preferred route in my opinion.

Crowdsourcing does seem to have a potential for delivering a different viewpoint on solving challenges, issues and complex problems but does have some formidable issues to be well  thought through.

I hope this ‘list of lists’ helps prompt you to become aware, to think about and attempt to work through these so you are in good shape to get real value out of your crowdsourcing engagements that all can value, extract something and appreciate.

A final post on crowdsourcing is next up in a few days time. Part one is here “Evaluating crowdsourcing – offering a bright future”

The post So Are You Thinking Crowdsourcing? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Crowdsourcing does have both the potential to point towards disrupting possibilities, extends the concept of open innovation into a wider source of participation from a diverse community not possible to reach by other means as effectively. It can simply connect a ‘crowd’ of people to a common purpose. All in all, if applied carefully it can provide you with a leading edge of innovation knowledge and insight.

I wanted to step back a little and take a more measured look at crowdsourcing over three posts. This is part one.

Crowdsourcing must be a powerful concept then?

Potentially the answer is yes, yet it does come with many “buts” that need the understanding to extract the value of the crowd and that can become complicated. There are a growing number of experts or specialised resources that can ‘host’ your crowd challenge but you need to be clear on what you are attempting and be reassured those that you work with do have the expertise they claim.

According to different sources the ‘crowd economy’ has been growing 50 to 70% per year in the last two years but admittedly from a low base. Will it continue to grow at these rates or even more? I believe the chances are more, yet this will be determined by those that understand and learn the practices, pitfalls and levers to this, and that is going to be decided by organizations determined to put in the time and dedicated resources into learning, so they can translate the “emerging practices” into their practices that provide value, impact and returns.

Crowdsourcing does have a sound potential to compliment or simply become your principal source of turning concepts and challenges into solid ideas that do have an impact. It certainly has its place alongside the reliance on simply internally generated ideas but crowdsourcing needs to be well understood and have its own process to work through.

Is the crowd economy the way of the future?

Is it faster, potentially lower costs than the alternatives of discovery but can sometimes generate overwhelming data. The insights or real nuggets need teasing out and determining.

What do you gain that is additional to what you are currently doing?

The top line metrics to begin thinking this through lie in determining the impact you are looking for, understanding the reach potential and different engagement possibilities, determine and ensure there is a level of satisfaction to all those that participate, clarify the cost of any such implementation / initiative in setting up, learning and translating into commercial outcomes  and getting a good sense of your ability to deliver on all those great new ideas in resources, time and cost.

Every conversation, challenge, event and community building is likely to be different and that lack of the ability to have a repeating process will certainly drive the cost of origination a lot higher. That needs understanding, and convincing those above that the setup and origination costs for each crowdsourcing challenge or project are going to contain a fair amount of the costing. We will go into that in a future post covering different challenges today.

A definition of crowdsourcing that does seem right to me.

I like this extract from the New York Times:

“Crowdsourcing is the practice of engaging a ‘crowd’ or group for a common goal- often innovation, problem-solving or efficiency. Crowdsourcing can take place on many different levels and across various industries (social and government). Thanks to our growing connectivity, it is now easier than ever for individuals to collectively contribute- whether with ideas, time, expertise or funds- to a project or cause. This collective mobilisation is crowdsourcing”

They go on to say:

“This phenomenon can provide organisations with access to new ideas and solutions, deeper consumer engagement, opportunities for co-creation, optimisation of tasks, and reduced costs. The internet and social media have brought organisations closer to stakeholders, laying the groundwork for new ways of collaborating and creating value together like never before. The approach is being embraced:

“Crowds are a hit. Millions of people, connected by the internet, are contributing ideas and information to projects big and small. Crowdsourcing, as it is called, is helping to solve tricky problems and providing localised information. And with the right knowledge, contributing to the crowd- and using its wisdom- is easier than ever”

So where are you on the crowd continuum? Is it to simply make money, to produce better results or help create a better world or are you bravely attempting all three?

What are the top objectives for launching a crowd venture?

I’ve looked at a fair number of these top objectives but CrowdsourcingWeek.com offers these six.

1) Crowdsourcing solves problems from non-traditional sources,

2) it funds new ideas and businesses,

3) identifies crowd-based insights to surface new perspectives,

4) delivers awareness, publicity and buzz value,

5) it can launch a product / service / idea or news and finally

6) it can create breakthrough innovation.

So where is this crowdsourcing movement heading?

Again there are plenty of thoughts and suggestions. Firstly we have the bigger “meta” trends or present phenomena driving much of our thinking.

The constant rise of social networks and the media, the equal rise of the entrepreneurial, startup culture is feeding this need for lower cost, but extracting greater insights. The reduction in mass marketing effectiveness, a tightening up of capital and limited resources drives even more the efficiencies expected from our organizations and crowdsourcing makes up with gaining more abilities for agility, understanding and gaining evidence of shifts that are taking place faster than traditional research techniques can provide as trends important to your specific issues you need solutions for.

Equally, the authenticity, transparency, trust and credibility are all changing. There is a rise of the independent voice, free agents, opinion shapers, independent parties who can now greatly influence outcomes than ever before. Users are generating more content and insights that are affecting enterprises and how what and why products, service and often the business model has to be constantly checked, refreshed and aligned. Lastly, here you have a generation ‘thing’ where the Gen Y seem to be significantly different than past generations and that needs greater understanding to account for.

We are seeing increasing calls for greater speed, increased customization, engagement, authenticity, the different view on value, functionality. The monetization needs greater understanding, security and vested interests need greater collaboration and increased connections. It is a global, connected, converging world that needs a constant attention to curation, filtering and context relating than ever.

We need to understand and attempt to manage in this rapidly changing environment.

Crowdsourcing is emerging and still has controversial emotions and questions

In this opening post on establishing a top-level clarity on crowdsourcing, I’d like to offer these question we need to raise, explore and find answers too. In the second part of this post, we’ll see what answers we have, or just admit they are still out there needing solutions or open to more discussion.

These are:

1. There needs to be a more central source of reference around crowdsourcing. Until we achieve this it will remain fragmented and silo’s of knowledge, experience and leading practice remains buried from the majority and the individual learning curve, and will prevent crowdsourcing to become mainstream.
2. There are still very few people inside organisations who really understand all the differences, value and danger points on how crowd collaborations really work.
3. Those within the developing world are likely to embrace crowdsourcing faster than the developed world as they can sense a real competitive advantage.
4. We will need to find and establish better ways to manage and curate crowd-based efforts than we have available to us now.Will these be through specialised organisations or developed on a backbone of internal practices and experience tapping into a cloud-based set of solutions you “grab and string” together to meet specific challenges?
5. Will larger companies accelerate their investments in the crowd economy on growing recognition of its valuable part to play in growth and innovation, or will they remain laggards to smaller companies better positioned to extract and invest in crowd techniques, as they tap into these low-cost solutions to manage understanding and engagement on a global scale, one that is unable to be achieved without the IoT and low cost of technology?

In the next post, we will explore a host of current issues

We need to draw out numerous concerns, constraints, obstacles and build the case towards embracing crowdsourcing in more significant ways. We will look at current concerns, obstacles, and challenges, as well as lay out a thinking-through process, describe valuable attributes and the varied choices we need to consider.

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Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their agreement, I have added this to my own site as well but with some limited updates and changes.

The post Evaluating Crowdsourcing – offering a bright future? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Perhaps I have fallen into the very trap I have campaigned about in the past, in recognizing and resolving the disappointing results we achieve from all the work we put into the front end of innovation. The “warm and fuzzy” front end of innovation can make us all a little grumpy.

Let me explain. I recently wrote out a newsletter – termed a thought or two – to my innovation network. This network is split between the advisers and consultants delivering into clients and the clients themselves, that I have a connections into that have built over the years. These are mostly through knowing them, working with them, exchanging or simply connecting in LinkedIn. The subject was the changes occurring at the front end of innovation.

My argument was the results we have obtained from a disconnected set of front end activities was poorer than they should be, and this needs changing. I feel there is a real shift potential happening today through connecting technology and connected solutions to ‘transform’ this front end. My feeling is the front end is often “warm and fuzzy” and it needs to be radically redesigned. I wrote about “hearing all the voices of ideas at the front end and the “two distinct parts of the innovation funnel” building from my original post “the new extended innovation funnel“, written in 2011.

Well I delivered the “warm” in this latest “heads up newsletter” and yes I received back some nice compliments on my thinking, as “nicely put”,”completely agree” “confirmed my thinking for a several years”, one I loved “idea driven innovation does not work.”

I even had a few coming back fairly strongly in delivering ‘grief’ around: “you seem to be telling only half the story” or “did you pay attention to what I have said before” or finally even one suggesting their solution, presented over many years, was really the one to answer my piece, not  provide even more new ones.

So far these comments have come from those advising into clients, not (potential) clients themselves, that are clearly far to busy managing the fragmented front end they are responsible for. I often find it takes time to percolate down breaking those different ideas into organizations, it often tends to be a “wait and see” or what is best practice on this? Then they get ‘caught out’ and chase for instant answers on this or that. I often wonder why that is so? No prizes being offered!

So, some ‘grief’, some compliments, and I ended up feeling ‘warm’ but a little chastened, as I had failed in clearly raising the level of curiosity intended in my mail out for a greater, deeper engagement that I was attempting. A view to prompt the thinking about the front end differently, perhaps I left this maybe far too “fuzzy” for many and not with a clear enough a value statement to build from by engaging me more on a direct, more consultative basis. Partly my intention as I’ll explain here.

Moving from warm and fuzzy into bubbling to the surface.

Clearly in the ‘heads up’ newsletter I was not as specific as I should have been, it got a little buried in the build up, the context setting. So I need to spell out a little more on that I am seeing / appreciating a greater clustering of software solutions that feed into and out of the idea management process and I’ll start this a little more here.

The ‘thing’ that is new is the technology is beginning to really link all this external and internally generated knowledge or insights, and this is coming from software solutions. I am not claiming ideas from outside, roadmapping, technology search, idea relating are new in themselves, it just has not been CONNECTED as it can be now – that is the new part.

That inflow and outflows makes it more dynamic, structured and capable of getting ideas that have potentially greater impact and relationship – relationship to people engagement, to criteria set or defined and alignment into the goals / objectives of the organization with its innovation.

Providing the ‘heads up’ newsletter here. It builds a common story on our failing at the front end of innovation

So let me provide the newsletter here also, it still does build the argument for change even if it seems “warm and fuzzy” for a number of people within my network. The software solutions I allude too, well those clients interested or curious enough can contact me. The consultants that want to know, well they will equally find out soon enough.

So here is the newsletter, I will be explaining the impact and change potential that can be made in a future post.

The front end of innovation is undergoing considerable change, is it for you?

Ideas need to be even more connected both within the organization and outside coming in. Why? With all the multiple forces at work that seem to be challenging and transforming so much in this age of increasing disruption, we are requiring a bolder set of innovation solutions than ever before.

The need to see beyond incremental products as the ‘safe’ solution is being questioned today, ever-more so and that is driving the big shift at this front end. Innovation needs to deliver far more.

The value of ideas is not valuable unless connected.

We are long past “ideas for ideas sake” although I’m still told I’m very wrong here with all the continued calls to create those ideation ‘hotspots’ as that seems to engage those within organizations or so many think.

How mistakenly wrong this call for simply ideas really is. Failure remains still as high as, or even higher, than ever where precious resources get consistently side-tracked. Most of this “cause and effect” you can point towards as being purely internally created, in generating the innovation without that real market awareness or client understanding. Broader engagement in innovation creation is presently hampered by this narrow view. One solution is that we need to deepen the front end of understanding and I believe solutions are in plain sight.

Having an Idea Management system, as a stand-alone, is fine for incremental innovation but if your organization is really looking for industry spanning outcomes that yield radical, more distinctive and sometimes disruptive innovation, this does require a greater commitment well beyond aspects of open innovation, selective crowd-sourcing or hackathons. It needs greater front end connection than just relying on purely internally generated ideas, ones that seem so often provided to fit specific and narrow agenda’s. Many innovations emerging from this internal orientation are lacking real market and customer awareness.

Resources within innovation are often highly constrained and can get so easily distracted due to poor scoping or disciplines or chasing idea rainbows. We have so much wasted effort, demoralizing and counter-productive inputs and outputs generating poor final outcomes that don’t fit the current needs of customers, or transform the landscape sufficiently by picking up all the signals that are all around us.

There is a real need to challenge what we have been doing and re-evaluate it. We have come a good way towards more strategic innovation, less operational necessity as this point of time.

The big shift potential at the front end of innovation

The big change in my mind is that organizations need to shift from idea generation being simply generated from inside the organization as the starting point. For me the shift to trends and market signals coming into the organization to kick-start the internal generation, to connect the dots, develop far more cross-industry awareness, this is becoming the real and current ‘buzz’ and enabler to getting closer to finding innovation, that can offer a higher impact and return.

It is within the clustering of software solutions around idea management that changes the dynamics, enables greater engagement, higher quality and relevant inputs and provides the outcomes to be more structured and impactful.

Coming from the outside-in offers so much fresh stimulus yet it is recognizing those signals as value is become the innovating challenge, translating these into innovation deliverables.

How do you organize around all the changes that are coming from cross-industry awareness, determining the trends that taking place before our very eyes as the potential dots that might connect with the internal thinking? Yet we remain stubbornly blind to them while we conduct internal idea generation as our starting point and then go outside. We need to rethink the front end totally differently.

Today we need outside-in first in organized, structured ways, before we internally generate and then either go back outside or develop from within. A greater need for engagement and enablement requires different solutions at this front end.

We need to open up to what is going on all around us, daily and allow that ‘greater’ external thinking in prior to idea management, so we can relate the ‘known’ from within, with the becoming-known or the “we were unaware,” the unknowns, from outside to connect the unconnected for some dramatically different innovation outcomes.

Are you changing your front end of innovation?

You should be redesigning your front end radically differently from today. Why don’t you talk to me on exploring this shift taking place, before your very eyes, a little more to relate or clarify these changes? The front end is shifting, are you making plans? You should be. I am an email or phone call away.

In summary here within this post.

I got some grief, I got some compliments on raising the difficulties that we still struggle with, at this front end of innovation, one or two got annoyed that I was not providing them the solutions I was alluding too.

Did I fail in communicating a growing shift at the front end of innovation – no!. Sure I’m going to gift wrap the whole story am I not? Yeah right! I need to live and through my research, and work through Agility Innovation Specialists I’m around to provide my innovation expertise and service in my advocacy practice.

I come back to a lovely comment made by a good friend and inspiration thinker I knew in Singapore, Dilip Mukerjea and his brain dancing thinking:  If you wish to have value for money would you give money for value?

So there is a shift. Connecting the front end through software that integrates the inside, the outside, the capturing process, the translating process, the registering and the plotting going forward process I think is different, radically different through its connecting possibilities. If we can replace more of the ‘fuzzy’ at the front end that it is beyond the simple fact that the front end is all about needs, insights, different perspectives, it is about breaking down and connecting up all the silo’s that have held the front end up, we might achieve a greater connection and engagement, that can deliver better results.

I believe is absolutely necessary for innovation to fulfill its promise and be more central to our growth plans within organizations and we, it seems are getting closer, in terms of creating an integrated end2end innovation system as something that is finally beckoning, at least at the front end initially!

That is the ‘breaking’ story – warm and fuzzy but connecting the front end of innovation. More will come soon.

The post Warm and Fuzzy at the Front End of Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

This is making the pulse race a little more until you actually begin to enjoy the sensation?

It brings out a sudden rush of emotions. It can be intense, it moves you in a particular direction, often you are struggling to regain control, and everything around you heightens in your awareness. You love it or you hate it.

Either way it gives a real rush.
Imagine harnessing all this sudden energy in different ways. Crowdsourcing often taps into these rushes of energy, insights and excitement The goal here is to move the crowd towards a new direction in their collective thinking to solve a problem.

To get a diverse group of individuals caught up, you need to really give them something they need to go too and want to participate in. The getting caught up in a football match, or simply letting yourself completely go at a concert, can be as nearly as emotional for you as for the performers.

Crowdsourcing is going one better

Yet in crowdsourcing you simply can go one better, you are the one performing, you are participating and delivering your ideas, thoughts, solutions. Others are reacting, responding, picking up on this surge of energy and collectively you begin to build something that answers a specific challenge. It actually becomes an even better rush.

Crowdsourcing today is being used across many challenges that are tackling social issues, global concerns, individual community or organizational questions that need “our” opinion and engagement. The concern for me is as we have this greater access to technology, crowdsourcing is spawning everywhere. How do you break through and attract the crowd?

Knowing what we are getting into becomes critical to participate
Designing the challenge becomes critical. To appeal we need to know what we are moving towards to feel we can freely take part. This is becoming much harder work as crowdsourcing reaches across so much and often is seeking out the opinion of those that are harder to reach. It has to separate itself out, my standing out from the crowd, by its needed ‘litmus test’ of being a crowd-worthy distinctive and simple idea that offers a concept that captures our imagination and the wish to participate.

We need it to always know if it is crowd-worthy
These crowd-worthy challenges trigger us into action. We just simply want to take part, to contribute. The fun begins for the organizers. They really need to offer a compelling set of reasons not just for us to participate initially but find the multiple ways to hook us in to continue to help in building from all the collective efforts. They need to provide a robust platform that responds to this sudden rush of energy but also find ways to keep it generating and moving along, in contributions and activity spiralling up the engagements, exchanges and growing involvement and interest.

It often does need a really significant thinking through if you want to really delve into a real challenge; it can equally be a challenge that is simply ‘put out there’ to gather and illicit ‘quick’ opinions. There is our need to understand “the shades of crowd separation” on who it might attract and what can be expected as the response and then be quick enough to adapt if it draws in suddenly really different participants.

Crowdsourcing is straddling so much today.

We need to tackle globalization issues, we need to come together to solve problems that impact lives, we worry over security, we seek to customize many things, we seek alternatives, we are tackling convergence in different ways, we are seeking out the freeing of our time far more than in the past.

Equally crowdsourcing is probing the experience economy, wanting to understand authenticity, explore privacy matters, pushing to form new connections, curate and filter lots of different stuff, much of what we are doing is blurring and crowdsourcing is attempting to pick this apart to help.

So where is crowdsourcing heading?

There are inherent risks in ‘casting a wide net’ as much can slip through the netting if you are chasing the big fish, you miss often the tastiest and sort after. Challenges are emerging in so many different ways and where you go and ‘fish’ will often determine the catch.

The question is increasingly becoming who do we use as crowd providers to help us in our challenges? The risk of over-hype, of contributor fatigue, is partly driving the industry offering ‘crowd solutions’ so spend time getting to understand what is being offered to see that it delivers on your crowd sourcing needs. Do remember you need to have a good ‘going in plan’ even if this changes once you talk with the specialists in this field.

These specialists are the ones that can separate rhetoric, provide a robust understanding of all the needs, from building an increasing “governance of understanding”  They work constantly on rules, language, technology, outreach, listening, content provision and focus intent. They provide a robust platform and good analytical capability to be a partner of choice, offering the venue the crowd wants to ‘surge’ towards.

That is yet again, another rush to stand out in a crowd, to be at the front in the ability to provide a comprehensive package and knowledge, to be able to ‘marshal’ the event, to give the best possible experience for the crowd to participate and contribute.

There are some interesting times for all those wanting to be in the crowd or organizing the events, making it a dedicated time and a great experience.

The post That sudden surge within the crowd first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

• I like the principles of “demonstrating, validating, sharing and discussing” as you ‘plug’ into each other so you can achieve active dialogue on ‘given’ subjects on a solid ‘give and take’ approach.
• Often we constrain ourselves in working out the prescribed agenda of needs before we get into any dialogue, I think this is a huge mistake. We should make conversations creative, a rich mix of development techniques that generate good interactions and create that growing bond and identification.
• We need to allow time to let discussions and exchanges grow and flow and sometimes they can move into unusual directions that lead to even better creative exchanges for value building.
• We need to seek a bias for action, by simply keeping on asking the basics of “for whom, why are we discussing this, how can we proceed, when and what issues stand in our way?”
• I like the idea to start off any potential innovation conversation with a belief of its change possibilities; it opens us up to what both parties can truly get out of the collaboration.

The need is for both sides to feel they are gaining from any collaborations

• We should always start with the belief that we need to gain mutually, and often just simply recognizing that you might ‘just’ simply gain personal knowledge and insights that could offer value somewhere ‘down the line’.
• Each side constantly needs to track back to a sense of worth and that comes from allowing time for feedback and open thinking. Take your time to really engage in mutual conversations, they prove to be increasingly valuable over time.
• By the use of design thinking techniques can certainly help in providing a greater dimension to provide ideas to flow, makes exchanges and creative moves towards solutions. Learn the techniques and then try it as an alternative way to work and create together.
• We need to practice “circles of conversation” where they loop around, move around the parties and you gain increasingly from the positive reinforcing loop of different conversation strands.
• Lastly, we all bond, sometimes not so much with the problem but far more with the person explaining the problem, so mixing up the expected problem statement with personal experience and your values makes for a far more positive atmosphere, leading to fruitful conversations you might not have initially expected.

Why is collaboration so important to our future?
As we engage, we learn.
We can’t imagine what we don’t often see; others open our minds to new possibilities. We can stay anchored in what we see and do, or if we are prepared to let go and have this ‘freedom’ to look for mutual exchange we can scale new heights. Conversations, exchanges and collaborations give us the experience to learn.
The huge value of collaborative exchanges is how it opens up our minds as we sometimes realise that we were ‘vested’ in selective thoughts that were less informed than we expected. Opinions can fall away as better ones replace them.
We need to let go, unlock the knowledge that comes from collaborations. Just remember outsiders are not insiders, they have different perspectives and do not expect to ‘shoe horn’ their opinions into the one size fits all.
I’d argue to remain as open as possible, so as to allow yourself to simply open up in a world of mutual collaboration, it can lead to some powerful innovation ideas. Build trust, value your own instincts and permit judgement calls to be pushed off until you have allowed the other party to explain their potential contribution, and then jointly work towards the solutions.
Make your collaborative efforts move just beyond open innovation into relationships that continue the learning process for all sides. Make all your collaborating endeavours stimulating, then you move into that higher creative, co-creating gear and it is a far more rewarding place to be.
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Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have republished it on my own site. I recommend you should visit the Hype blog site where they have a range of contributors writing about a wide-ranging mix of ideas and thoughts around innovation, its well worth the visit.

The post Achieving a higher collaborative gear first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

In this fuzzy front end of innovation where ideas are generated, there are many places we can ‘discover and listen’ to the voices that will provide concrete ideas and concepts.

Let’s take the time to recognize these and ask you, the reader, do you have a systematic plan to capture all these voices?

The Voice of the Customer
The most talked-about place to find the ideas that are closer and relevant are the search for new ideas around the jobs needing to be done (jtbd).

We get closer to these voices when we use a variety of techniques that give this voice its chance to speak.

We do this through customer focus groups, user panels, customer surveys, lead-user research, direct observation of the user in their environment, and allowing ourselves to become fully immersed in a customer’s experience.

You can read What if customers evaluated your company’s ideas? posted by Hutch Carpenter or Want to be Successful at Innovation? Start exploring your Customers’ “Jobs to be done”! posted by Elena Ozeritskaya  over on the Hype blog and so many more around “jobs to be done” or “ideation” but please don’t forget the many other voices that need to be heard and the thinking behind these voices captured as they are equally of potentially great value.

The Voice of the Value Chain

We can gather plenty of ideas when we have visits to our suppliers and listen to their engineering, their specialists that work with our products or the production of the materials, even work alongside their product development staff as they often have broader industry exposure than we do, within our own organization. We can construct more formal cooperative and technology agreements and exchanges with our suppliers to find new ways to collaborate.

Also by spending time ‘in the field or marketplace’ we can discuss with the many players in the distribution system (distributors, wholesalers, customers, final retailers or those closest to our final point of sale. We can then look at all the stages along the value chain for opportunities to innovate in different ways. Just imagine all the collaborators working with your company that has knowledge that would contribute.

The Voices within the Organization
The more your innovation strategy is known internally the more likely you are to focus your opportunity investigations and draw out those rich ‘nuggets’ that lie somewhere within your organization’s experiences or insights. You can deliberately organize an operational capabilities audit to see what it might reveal in improvements or fresh ideas.

The attraction of brainstorming both within your functional and cross-functional groups can offer so much but the brainstorming techniques need to generate excitement and be seen as well worth the time and engagement, otherwise, these can fail badly. Often we miss the chance to systematically and equally on ad hoc occasions talk with the sales team in some structured ways to reveal their insights.

We should also remember many of the employees at the company might be users and will certainly offer an opinion that might provide some very frank and honest feedback.  Of course, there is that tried and tested new product idea suggestion scheme or contest but these do need to really offer something, besides money to gain real contributors value. Lastly you might want to build or tap into a company idea bank.

The Voice of the Industry

We often ignore what is going on around us, many companies don’t really have good intelligence gathering systems, and they tend to stay within very limited silos. There is absolutely no reason for this as the capturing of trends, of new patents, reading the prospectus or annual reports can yield much that can generate fresh ideas and point to future directions. Often a company belongs to numerous professional associations yet those attending fail to pick up some possible ideas as they feel this is not their job, we need to make it theirs.

The number of technical conferences that people within the organization attend gives such a productive source of insights but are they actually being ‘fed back’ into the system or just stay with the attendee alone?

Then how often is your organization participating in different standards committees, where you are often given great clues of the ‘collective’ thinking of trends, issues, and roadblocks that might all lead to breakthrough ideas to gain real competitive advantage.

The key to all of these being well-captured is putting to use the idea management software and making it mandatory for those that attend and engage to come back and ‘file’ an ideas report for those responsible for product or service development to get the chance to ‘touch and feel’ the ideas emerging around them.

Voice of the Experts

So many consultants, training professionals, and advisors are interacting daily with your company, are you tapping into this source of knowledge? Do you consider setting up focus groups with industry experts; take time out to tap into a consulting practice for its broader expertise deliberately for extracting ideas. Do you work with universities or individual facility members who can contribute different thinking and provide a rich source of knowledge?

Do you think about setting up some specific dedicated time for ‘walking around’ ideas with your research companies or consultants? Do you ever allow for providing a dedicated time that puts the product ‘brief’ on one side for the moment and just talks and exchanges? How often do you make contact through venture and equity funds that specialise in your industry and how these can offer up some very focused insights into your thinking.

Lastly, within our experts the relationships with government labs and private R&D labs are very engaged in leading-edge concepts and knowing and understanding these can dramatically alter your own perceptions.

Then we have the voice of Secondary Research

It always staggers me how academic papers are shunned and discounted yet offer such a rich source of insights and investigation. Of course, Google and the many different internet search engines can yield some interesting ideas but how often do we never dedicate the time or fail to go past the second or third page.

I have found on page 8 or even ten often a search item that dramatically alters my thinking. These searches take time on the internet and you do have to stay focused and disciplined to extract all that you can as the ‘search strands’ can often take you so widely off course you wonder how you got there.

Of course, you have trade articles, white papers; competitor’s analysis, and trade press clippings, but I wonder how systematic you really are in these? You should be.

Lastly, patent scans can be deadly boring, try doing those across twenty or so countries in multiple languages, it can be tough but thankfully these searches are getting easier, just go and visit the Pharmaceutical or Computer / internet related organizations to understand their leading practice in this and how strategically import this is to them. It will make your efforts seem minuscule in comparison.

Ideas can come from so many places – are you systematically listening?
We think of idea management systems in such narrow ways. Strategically across your organization, you should find ways where all ideas can get captured, where everyone working within the organization knows contributing knowledge, insights, intelligence and thinking can make a contribution.

Do you have a clear and precise plan to capture all those ideas that are whirling around or are so many ideas just left ignored, never captured or simply drowned out by your fixation and focus only upon the sources that might just be scratching the surface?

Perhaps you should give the many voices the chance to be heard? 

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Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have republished it on my own site. I recommend you should visit the Hype blog site where they have a range of contributors writing about a wide-ranging mix of ideas and thoughts around innovation, its well worth the visit.

The post Are you hearing all the voices for ideas? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.