This quote is from the former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Henry Rumsfeld, who mentioned: “unknown unknowns” (Rumsfeld, 2002).

Since then, people have started using quadrants of knowledge, i.e., known known, known unknown, unknown known, and unknown unknown, to understand and explain the nature of risk but also of leading to an opportunity.

For innovators so much of innovation is hard to detect, it needs discovery and working through these quadrants of knowledge as well. We need to treat ideas the same on how anything needs assessing but it needs to pass through a different thinking about knowledge understanding, as there are ‘known knowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’ and we need to prepare for both within our innovation activities.

Our pursuit in life is often the same as our innovation efforts, it is in the search for discovery. Often it happens, that we already feel better equipped for exploring and observing by just getting out of our usual everyday working environment.

It is through this positive action, the need to search and explore, we can discover something that had previously been unknown, a new opportunity to give it a new value. Converting something previously unthought of (those unknowns) gives the potential for far greater value.

If you would like to read this paper where the above came from, then go to this link

For me, a good idea management system needs to be set up for all known and unknown possibilities to capture their potential. The front end of innovation has the challenge of generating ideas, but these come from these two distinct avenues – improving the known and discovering the unknown. Let me explain why breaking down our thinking into knowns and unknowns helps us.

Some links provided here take you to what one provider of idea management software can provide. There are a number of choices and I would always recommend a good, comprehensive evaluation before you finalize your choice, then it really needs to be well-embedded within your innovation process, to extract the best value out of it and give you a consistent return on its costs.

The knowns are those products, services, processes, etc. that we know we can improve upon.

The ‘knowns’ are usually tangible in what we already see. We are often specifically asked to improve on them by finding cost savings, improving their functionality or design. It becomes our task in delivering alternatives, in new varieties, updates, technology enhancement, or simply recognizing the lifecycle of the existing needs refreshing, changing or altering. Much of this work is incremental or distinctive in innovation. This is where a good, well-designed idea management system is ideal, being able to deal with capturing and translating the idea and turning it into something realizable and offering improved value on the existing (knowns). This is managing the innovation portfolio in a systematic and focused way.

Idea management software can offer a structured approach that provides a full concept lifecycle management process, directly built into it. It takes the management of ideas to implementation planning as its hand-over point is when the concept moves into commercialization entering usually a portfolio and pipeline management system.

We need to sustain and nurture the incremental

The constant challenge is coming up with ideas that are not simply one-offs, they need to be continuous in their pursuit. Most of our innovation in organizations is based on incremental improvements that need a sustaining capability. One of the most important parts of any sustaining capability is having access to software that allows for multiple activities to build. This capturing needs a more sustaining routine, a certain familiarity, including an idea management software that can be customized constantly to your ongoing needs, being ideal for managing most of our business needs, that of protecting and building the core.

When you are dealing with assessments of the known, there is a need to have a good evaluation process. Ideas need to be opened up to a greater stimulus, to an audience as wide as possible to contribute and gain their best insights or suggestions. It is encouraging and capturing that additional knowledge, that additional piece of the jigsaw that was missing, that someone else can provide in the development process.

Your job is to improve on the nascent idea you have, to get others involved and build upon this further. The last thing you need to do is spend large parts of your time on the mechanics because you are directing your creative energy away from improving your ideas into winning ones. Solutions need to focus on value, need and growth outcomes and often the reason why we settle on the knowns far more is that we are seeing ways which are seemingly easier to advance, to make improvements on the existing. Thankfully having a good idea management system can greatly support this.

The real value of any software capturing system is more for the unknowns as it requires greater collaboration, observation, and awareness. Unknowns need open, questioning minds and this requires a place to capture them and encourage others to collaborate and equally work on moving them from the unknown to the known and eventually highly valued.

The unknown becomes very different in approaching idea generation.

It needs a different type of approach. It needs to have a different level of innovation idea funnel. I wrote about this some time back, discussing the extended innovation funnel (here) and used this visual. It begins to break down the complexity we find in managing the two ends of the innovation process, discovering and driving concepts through the system.

The unknowns require a wide usage of capturing tools and techniques.

Observation is most probably one of the most important skills to have. It is highly valued in the idea management process. Thankfully technology made available many of these observing techniques and became ‘bolt-on’ modules or are offered in the idea management software solution out of the box – meaning you can automate this “fuzzy” front end.

All the different capturing solutions available allow you to get comfortable in their use, so you are free to do this observing, opening your mind to new possibilities, to find a relationship to what you are doing. The more you can turn unknowns into knowns that are validated through different identification tools. They feed the idea pipeline. For instance:

I always believe the more your organization is exposed to common tools, the more they form a common basis for building a communicating language, protocol, and common purpose.

A common tool I consider as highly valuable within the idea to commercialization process as it frames dialogues in time, resource allocation and the complexity of approach is the three-horizon-framework. If we have a good frame to frame uncertainty within innovation then you can begin to describe this to others while managing the unknowns.  The three-horizon framework has terrific value for considering options, discussing uncertainty and framing the business of today with the challenges you might be facing of the future.

For instance, when it comes to ideas:

For example, you can take the knowns and unknowns and recognize these have different discover needs and time horizons. They need different resources and thinking through to manage. This early recognition can change the very tone of innovation conversations and recognize what it takes in managing ideas that are partly incremental to service today’s business needs and more transforming, to help support the needs of the future.

In both cases, incremental and transforming, are taking ideas through to commercialization but in radically different ways. The value potential of those unknowns, pointing to the future, can grow in understanding over time, in exploring and experimentation.

All ideas that are ‘projecting’ change on your existing products, services or business models implicate the same – you must ensure you have the right conversations about time, resource allocation, expectancies and the ‘stark’ difference between exploitation and exploration when dealing with managing different types of innovation.

The pressure lays always on: how to quickly turn an unknown into a known?

The ability to prototype, changing an intangible concept into a working model, transforms the idea management stage. I would argue that prototyping needs to be in the idea management thinking from as early as it can be. It accelerates understanding, it validates and builds the experience, it allows valuable new insights to ‘play out over time’ to give increasing value. The more we prototype, the more we provide ‘hard’ evidence of the value of an idea turning into a concept to eventually arrive at a commercialized proposition.

By turning to a structured system of managing emerging ideas can allow you to capture your nascent idea, explore and then collaborate around them. Framing them even further in the context of value needs to be highly adaptable, robust and able to be scaled out. One of the best ways is to use a good, reliable and well-developed Idea Management software, for example, Hype does provide this, as well as a few others.

Innovation always has the best chance to flourish when people become engaged and really want to actively engage in searching out new ideas that have value and worth, but they need a place where this can be captured and shared. To achieve that ‘engage and exchange’ culture, you need a well-structured management system that can respond. Good idea management software systems give you a far better chance to innovate well, managing both the knowns and unknowns by capturing your discovery and exploration journey in effective and efficient ways, that gives you a clear system of record and the source of your organization’s collective knowledge to explore and exploit constantly.

 

**adapted and revised from an original post written for Hype Innovation, used an example within this post as a good Idea Management Software provider.

 

The post There are Knowns and Unknowns in Innovation: Let’s Manage Them Differently 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.

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’ve been evaluating if it has the same relevance in my mind in our more connected world, where speed, knowledge and exchanges are measured in microseconds.

This reminded me of a suggestion I made some time back and I thought I’d ‘air’ this again for engaging with others.

We constantly fall into the trap of not providing our listeners enough of a reason to ‘buy into’ our thoughts. We forget to either pitch it to their mental framework or we do not provide a set of compelling arguments that allows our idea a mutual recognition of its value or structure, to take it forward and transform it into something tangible and valuable.

I think using Rogers’s rate of diffusion principles you can end up offering a fairly powerful positioning statement.
You can also offer a simple framework in this five-point plan the chance to break down differences you might both hold, to build on the ‘evidence’ from a mutual recognition in the discussion on what your idea holds as a potential promise. It can be transformational as a way to approach engagement.

The five steps in engagement to map your conversations.

To get anyone out of their own thinking trap we need to associate our thinking with what would be valued by them, we have to make the value connections .

We can offer a uniform pathway based on Everett Rogers five steps principle:

What we must always offer in any conversation is a clear relative advantage to what is presently available, so we can gain their permission and identification. Then we can set about to explore these better alternatives, to clarify their progress and gain general ongoing acceptance or questioning.

Either way, it becomes a mutual engagement. Stressing the advantage of the idea by making a comparison, does allow for the chance of engaging in a worthwhile conversation.

Timing, circumstances and its value to the other person always need considering here. “Relative” becomes the critical word here.

• If we can offer compatibility with our own and other people’s existing values, and explore a migration path from their past experiences we might get more space to experiment. We need to draw others in and so we have to align ourselves to their experiences to frame it to their thinking bias.
• This becomes a job-to-be-done on unearthing unmet needs or the needs that can be improved upon. The job-to-be-done thinking is a great practice methodology to achieve adoption.
• The new tools, methods and different techniques becoming increasingly available to us, can certainly help us to explain complexity to reduce the perceived difficulties of adopting new practices. The whole gambit of gaming, the canvas techniques, visual mapping, design thinking all help considerably here.
• Any argument, discussion or position needs to simplify complexity as the one listening quickly ‘tunes out’ if we load the conversation with “too much detail” or jargon.
• We then can offer new ways for trialability to experiment in safe and limited risk ways. Lay out a clear path of experimentation and result milestones to manage expectancies and gain increasing support commitment.
• Steve Blank’s contention of “getting out of the building” and his customer development process offers one of many ways to learn, pivot and progress in bite-sized steps.
• Finally, we can provide observability, so others can see the results we can make progress. By keeping this open, it can be clearly challenged and blocked in many ways but openness and transparency does eventually reduce resistance.

If we can clarify change and our progress in learning we give others understanding. It is when we fail to communicate what they need to hear, that we are more likely to be blocked or our project cancelled. We need to ‘demonstrate’ progress and show its value.

Everett Rogers, five steps might offer up a possible pathway to unlock much within innovation and reduce our different personal biases that can trap our ideas to not allow them to be seen in their real value to move forward, and be supported by others, as they gain their essential engagement and buy-in.

What do you think?

It’s worth a try to build your own engagement stories around the five principles suggested. Give it a try the next time you want to bring others onto your side and look to construct a mutual engagement.

The post Gaining idea engagement can be a five step process. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The ‘classic’ innovation funnel talked about is wrong for todays job!
Certainly every company does have some form of funnel, so it can whittle down the host of ideas into that final concept that eventually becomes commercialised and released into the market.

It is most commonly seen as wide at the front to capture all these ‘great’ ideas and narrows to the selected ones to go through a selection process although the more famous one being the Stage-Gate one made famous by Robert G Cooper (shown further on in the blog)

I don’t want to get into the specifics of stage-gates, how many, why these have certain assigned hurdle rates, why they are equally loved and hated etc., etc. That is fuel for a later blog perhaps.

The funnel is always depicted as easier than the real thing, the activities that goes on daily in each company working through the idea to final concept. Taking ideas to commercialisation is an awful lot of hard work.

The worry and constant complaint is, that irrespective of our generating “thousands of ideas,” we still only seem to get between 5 to 10% success rate.

This low success rate is what you seem to hear more about than anything else laying the blame on innovation, why? Maybe because our view of the funnel is wrong? Maybe because we are not listening and appreciating both sides of the funnel?

Tom Fishburne depiction of the funnel
Again this is seen set in the ‘classic’ traditional way, but with a real touch of Tom’s great humour. He also captures it well in that any idea entering the funnel is facing a ‘death of a thousand cuts. The jaws of a hungry alligator ready to devour all (ideas) that enter the funnel.

He implies that the funnel has got a certain reputation as something ready to constantly digest its next prey. But does it need to be like that?

The Innovation Funnel Actually Has Two Distinct Sides.

The Left Side is the one often not deeply appreciated as the really critical one and the side we often spend less focal time upon. “Before anything else, preparation is the key to success”. Really mastering this side of the funnel, allows for the potential for better ideas/ concepts to move through the complete funnel.

This is the raw end, the side that really is the hardest part, the often really, really, fuzzy part. This is the place mostly lying outside your organization’s domain of knowledge where the ‘real world’ functions and where you really need to constantly search and scan the horizon for possible ‘breaking opportunity or possibility, not just ideas that you think might fit from within your own world but ones that alter that world.

What do you need to capture within the left side of the funnel?

1). Firstly, this is where innovation and your strategy need to get good alignment. Having a clear perspective of what you need to focus upon is going to get you far quicker to spotting possible opportunities. It helps you to have a ‘reasonable’ understanding of intent, of capabilities, of potential to take this ‘raw material’ and convert it into a tangible set of ideas or concepts.

2) The External Knowledge gathering and Internal Alignment need to keep working these ‘nuggets’ of raw opportunities, realting them, exploring them, turning them over in your mind, in your thinking about possibilities and seeking different points of alignment.

3) The connecting points come from the deeper set of insights you have about your markets, your customers and their unmet needs and your capacities to translate these through exploring any potential from the ‘raw material’ and the degree’s of learning that comes with this, to convert it into something value and eventually commercial.

4)  Knowing where to go as sources of knowledge is becoming more critical. These can be through existing partners, through university connections, collaborations with competitors, institutes or by completing your own desk research offers you a wealth of places to explore. Simply observation in different markets, in-use studies or travelling in different countries and absorbing different insights and experiences provides the ‘scout’ the capture points. The key is being alert to ‘seeing possibility’ but at the same time ‘being aware’.

5) Once you have some raw concepts or ideas they will need some testing against. Not just can this be translated into a finished product that gives us value but does it map back to your research, your internal understanding of market/ customer and their needs. To sell any raw thinking back into a company you need to make it relevant, it needs to connect, and it needs context.

You really do need to make the necessary connections

1)      Going back to matching goals, the knowledge gained and needed and the internal capabilities to translate this really needs working through before it enters the actual internal process

2)      Also a preliminary assessment of if this can be managed and where it is going to be developed; purely internally (closed innovation) or do you need to have a collaboration with external partners (open innovation) or equally, the raw thinking was already found through a collaboration and you need to build the justification to take this further, in agreements, resourcing etc.

3)      Many organizations are looking beyond raw thinking and deliberately searching for concepts already part-baked or proven concepts that can be ramped up or scaled quickly or just needing the additional expertise your organization can bring into the mix.

Then the final part of the left side of the innovation funnel

1)      Doing the assessment of risks and returns. Assessing the potential value to the organization to turn its full resources on and take the idea/ concept through the idea to the commercialisation funnel. Addressing the gaps, the risks, the impact becomes the beginning of refining the business case

2)      It is at this point you transform possibility into business opportunity. The seeds of an idea have already been through a fairly vigorous evaluation, it is at this point you make the ‘case’ for this to enter the classic’ innovation funnel

Moving across to the Right Side of the Innovation funnel

This is the better known and discussed part of the funnel.

I will not go into that so much on this side, this is well discussed and debated by many. I just offer a few thoughts.

The crucial difference lies in listening and interpretation of the inflow from the left side.

By working through the left side of the funnel you have refined much more. What is entering the funnel is arguable not needing the traditional wide-neck funnel; it actually becomes the narrow part.

It is then a real need to widen out these as the concept takes hold and has resource taking these up and exploring the idea and working through the concept to turn it into final offerings or multiple ones for release into the world.

The generation of thousand of ideas becomes a misnomer as applied here.

Ideas were evaluated well before they entered the commercialisation process (the right side of the funnel). The critical thing here is they need to meet your portfolio aspirations and goals, any concepts need to ‘fit’. Fit not just a portfolio but the strategic goals, the product intent, the market and customer needs.

This is the point you start really testing and refining inside the organization.

Stop just ideas simply entering your commercilaization part of the funnel, it wastes precious resource and dilutes energy, better spent on focusing on the real few valuable potentials moving across into the right side of the funnel.

Taking concepts through the internal process,

We come back to the stages you take a concept through; it could look like this, based again on the stage-gate approach.

Emerging to the World

Where I do feel all the efforts made that get a raw opportunity into a concept and through often a highly structured and laborious internal system often misses the critical execution stage. Some even offer the view execution can be the harder part; it is where all the hard work meets market and customer reality.

The ability to execute an innovation initiative sometimes interrupts the ongoing business. Execution is an area that Chris Trimble and Vijay Govindarajan have written about in their book ‘The Other Side of Innovation- Solving the Execution Challenge.”

It is worth reading to understand this final part of any innovation introduction, it brings execution into its appropriate place, the realities of the market place and where (innovation) rubber really does hit the road.

A brief summary

So for me, the present thinking of the innovation funnel needs to be extended back, back before the classic ‘ideas’ of people gathered in brainstorming sessions or simply using idea management software to explore mostly random thoughts that often do not translate.

You need to start with a strategic perspective and define your intent, your intent to look for ‘targeted’ ideas and raw opportunities, not the ones randomly offered in idea generation sessions. Start at the beginning and not as we seem to do, in the middle.

Simply ‘ideas’ entering the funnel is a myth, it is far too simplistic a view.

Let’s listen to both sides of the innovation funnel, it can produce better (re)sounding results.

The more and earlier you know what kind of value your business is aiming to create, the better the eventual concepts entering the commercial end of the funnel will be.

Then managing these in the most appropriate way given the context in which your business operates makes both ends of the funnel mutually important.

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