I completed a series of posts in April 2023, published on this posting site, on cross-sector needs when considering or working in innovation ecosystems.

To get to a good understanding of cross-sector innovation ecosystems collaborations, you need to take a very considered holistic view of what is needed in any collaboration, let alone cutting across sectors to generate a successful outcome. All the elements of skills, processes, tools, capabilities, and behaviors are essential in supporting an effective collaboration across sectors that need to be involved.

I have summarized the key points of these four posts; click on the links referred to. I have outlined the multiple needs to consider so you are more aware of the differences and needs of managing within an ecosystem of collaborators.

The different points discussed in the four posts

You can click on the links if you want to read the full articles; I clearly encourage you to do just that!

My first post outlined differences in cross-sector collaborations that need more profound assessments of where to focus and understand.

The post discusses the importance of cross-sector innovation collaborations (CSIC) in today’s open innovation hubs and ecosystem management. This emphasizes that many challenges have become too complex to tackle alone or even in a single industry.

Collaborating in cross-sector consortia with diverse partners can provide the potential for improved operational productivity, shared application development, and skill enhancements.

The post outlines 11 essential skills, processes, tools, capabilities, and behaviors that are unique to cross-sector innovation collaborations, including interdisciplinary skills, co-creation processes, innovation tools and methodologies, collaboration capabilities, outcome orientation, flexible and adaptive behaviors, cultural sensitivity and awareness, resource sharing, risk management, governance and accountability, and continuous learning and improvement.

I conclude that CSIC is crucial to tackling highly complex challenges requiring a well-organized, coordinated, collaborative resolution.

My second post identified specific skills and toolkits to be considered.

In this post, I discussed

We need to recognize there are specific skills and tools required for cross-sector innovation ecosystem collaborations. Cross-sector collaborations are becoming essential for tackling highly complex issues that require collaborative resolution.

The post lists the unique skill set required for cross-sector collaboration, including interdisciplinary thinking, communication and collaboration, creativity and innovation, adaptability and flexibility, project management, cultural competence, strategic thinking, cultural differences, intellectual property, governance, funding and resources, measurement and evaluation, regulatory compliance, and communication and engagement.

In addition, I identified specific tools required for cross-sector innovation collaborations, including project management software, virtual collaboration tools, knowledge management systems, innovation management software, intellectual property management tools, cultural competence training, and data analytics and visualization tools.

The third post assessed the design and focused on the different understandings within partners that must be addressed to build a shared understanding and way to work.

The third post in this series on cross-sector innovation ecosystem collaborations discusses the design of effective collaboration. The post identifies several stages involved in creating a successful cross-sector innovation ecosystem collaboration, including defining the problem, identifying potential partners, building relationships and trust, defining roles and responsibilities, developing a co-creation process, and implementing and evaluating the collaboration.

The post also highlights the importance of understanding the unique needs of all involved and designing collaborations accordingly, considering common goals, recognizing and respecting different perspectives, creating a shared language, transparency, and accountability, managing intellectual property rights, and fostering a culture of innovation.

The post finishes by emphasizing the need for a nuanced and flexible approach that recognizes the unique needs and characteristics of the public and private sectors.

The final fourth post is about the appeal, interest, growing engagement, and judging outcomes.

This final post of the four-part series on cross-sector innovation ecosystem collaborations, emphasizes the importance of building interest and engagement by creating a compelling value proposition for potential collaborators.

The narrative and how it is built is vitally important. The narrative should identify shared goals and priorities, showcase successful collaborations, emphasize the unique strengths and resources that each sector brings to the table, create a collaborative and co-creation culture, establish clear roles and responsibilities, provide support and resources, foster transparency and inclusivity, measure and communicate impact, and emphasize how collaboration can create mutual benefit and value.

Collaborations can come in different names, such as co-creation, partnership innovation, systems innovation, collective impact, and convergent innovation, depending on the target audience and the values and priorities that resonate with them. The choice of name should communicate the value and potential of cross-sector innovation collaboration clearly and compellingly.

Finally, the success of a cross-sector innovation collaboration can be judged based on its impact, scalability, sustainability, and the creation of mutual benefit and value for all parties involved.

My view here is summed up as follows.

Cross-sector collaborations are partnerships between entities from different sectors, such as government, private sector, academia, and civil society. These collaborations can be powerful tools to address complex challenges that cannot be solved by any one sector alone.

Here are some key points to consider when summarizing cross-sector collaborations:

1. The benefits of cross-sector collaborations: Collaborating across sectors can bring together diverse perspectives, expertise, and resources to create innovative solutions that can have a lasting impact. Some benefits include increased efficiency and effectiveness, greater community engagement, and improved stakeholder outcomes.
2. The challenges of cross-sector collaborations: While they offer many benefits, they can also be challenging to establish and maintain. Power imbalances, conflicting goals, and communication barriers can hinder progress and make collaboration difficult. Overcoming these challenges requires strong leadership, effective communication, and a shared commitment to the goals of the collaboration.
3. Examples of successful cross-sector collaborations: There are many examples, from public-private partnerships in infrastructure development to community-led initiatives to address social issues. Key factors contributing to successful collaborations include clear goals and objectives, mutual trust and respect, and a willingness to learn and adapt.
4. Best practices for cross-sector collaborations: It is essential to follow best practices or leading practices to maximize the benefits of cross-sector collaborations. These include establishing clear roles and responsibilities, fostering open and honest communication, and creating mechanisms for monitoring and evaluation. Ensuring the collaboration is inclusive and engaging all relevant stakeholders is also essential.

In summary, cross-sector collaborations can be powerful approaches for addressing complex challenges. While they can be challenging to establish and maintain, following best practices and learning from successful examples can help ensure success.

By bringing together diverse perspectives and expertise, cross-sector collaborations can create innovative solutions that can have a lasting impact on communities and society as a whole.

Maybe it is time to consider what cross-sector collaborations can offer new growth, impact, and value to your organization.

The post Understanding cross-sector innovation ecosystem collaborations 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.

I have a friend when he is presented with something that stops him and makes him really have to think he would say “intriguing”. This joining forces is one of those ‘intriguing” moments for me.

Capgemini have been leading much within the transformation process around technology with all things digital, they have been pioneering and offering some significant advice around transitions. It seems they are ‘pulling’ in the innovation promise with this acquisition to add to their solution offerings.

I wrote about their Applied Innovation Exchange announcement recently and how I felt it was thin, a more “a tenuous toe in the water” and I finished the post with “I hear you Capgemini on the intent…but “there is a real need to put some ‘red meat’ on the bone here,” and that is what they seem to be doing in a “blink of an eye,” with this Fahrenheit 212 acquisition, or at least allow the tissues to be grafted on and take hold, so it can challenge where and how innovation transforms the business process.

David meets and marries a Goliath.

On first look at this acquisition you see a 180,000 people consulting firm, operating in 40 countries with nearly EUR12 billion in revenue, adding a 60 to 70 people innovation and design consultancy, operating in the US and less so in the UK and you wonder, what simply happens with such a move? Will one simply dwarf and overwhelm the other, will the small influence the big, in the positive ways both have as the initial intent of this deal? I hope so.

I was reading the press release of Capgemini, the usual corporate speak, released for shareholders and stakeholders, nicely reassuring, sufficient to appease and appraise the stakeholders. Then compared this with the wonderful open letter written by the Fahrenheit team. They tell much of the divide that somehow has to be bridged. Let me explain or illustrate in the words from these releases.

According to Capgemini’s press release “Fahrenheit 212 will contribute its specialized capabilities for innovation strategy and consumer-centric design to the broader offerings of Capgemini Consulting. The move opens growth opportunities for both companies through their combined capabilities”

Now lets see why Fahrenheit 212 was and hopefully still is a cut apart from the rest in innovation, through the open letter they wrote on their” boldest move yet”.

“Innovation moves forward….but in the same blink it’s something bigger”

The open letter just tells a real story of passion, intent, a mixture of hope and excitement. Of course, many ventures have been dashed on the rocks of despair but at this moment of time this is the sort of message I want to hear coming from the acquired and also explaining the potential course of the new journey ahead..

Let me pick out a few

“Innovation isn’t merely driving change. It is undergoing big changes of its own”

Fahrenheit paints the picture that I believe is absolutely right in its timing and assessment:

“ Not long ago, innovation was an under-the-radar business activity. Everyone applauded when serendipity served up an occasional breakthrough. But few businesses were relying on innovation to keep them relevant and growing.

That’s all changing. With breakneck speed, forces of disruption, shifts in consumer expectations, erosion of barriers to entry and a vibrant startup movement have propelled innovation from the background to a position as one of the most important activities for any growth-minded business to get right”

“The consequences are big. Innovation is simply too important to be random anymore”

Moving from the past to the future

In this they provide the background to the change being undertaken in innovation at the moment and then they go on to clarify the reason for the decision to be acquired and why they think it makes sense for both to make a move.

“But for the innovation discipline to be truly effective today, we must empower our creative impetus with new capabilities. Capabilities like robust software development, supply chain expertise, unique access to emerging technology and data analytics – things a few steps beyond what innovation firms are asked to do today – will soon become core requirements in the way innovation is conceived and driven to market”

“This all points to a bolder future and a new set of requirements for the business of innovation consulting. Where success isn’t measured in mere possibility, but in big strategies and breakthrough ideas made real”

Marriage of shared intent

“For Fahrenheit 212’s part, it represents a way to leapfrog our competitive set and bring an entirely unique combined force to market. Individually and in aggregate, our new capabilities will drive the realization of innovations as powerfully as we’ve ignited them at the front end.

Overnight we’ll gain access to new ability to turn big ideas into not just prototypes, but enterprise level solutions. We’ll also plug into Capgemini’s global network of Applied Innovation Exchanges – 30 workspaces around the world for exploring emerging-technology led transformation in areas like retail innovation, internet of things, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.

For our partners at Capgemini, linking up with Fahrenheit 212 represents a step toward their vision of redefining the way the consulting industry thinks and works. Bringing their world-class consulting and implementation practices to future-state problem solving and design.

Together we share a belief that solving for the challenges our clients will face in the future is only possible through the kind of visionary forward thinking that opens opportunities that aren’t yet in sight”

The combination has real potential if it is given the freedom to evolve but will it?

The words of Todd Rovak, the Managing Partner and CEO of Fahrenheit 212 offered these insights that give us the ‘glimpse’ into the future:

• Fahrenheit 212 fused design and development skills with a traditional management consultancy so they could assist clients well beyond identifying strong markets. By bringing creative and analytical capabilities together, Rovak said Fahrenheit can help clients unlock new spaces by identifying what existing assets to leverage and helping them design a brand strategy for the new market.
• The deal will additionally allow Fahrenheit to plug into Capgemini’s Applied Innovation Exchanges, 30 workspaces around the world where companies can immerse themselves in emerging technologies in areas like retail innovation, the Internet of Things (IoT), virtual reality and artificial intelligence. The Exchanges are also intended to help firms address the business disruptions confronting their industries.
• Fahrenheit 212 said the deal will enable the company to marry its creative impulse with an entirely new set of capabilities around robust software development, supply chain expertise, unique access to emerging technology and data analytics. “The ability to shape the future is only half the question,” Todd Rovak, Fahrenheit 212’s managing partner and CEO suggests “Being able to deliver the future in also vital.”
• The ability to combine innovation strategy and transformational thinking with enterprise-level implementation on a global scale is now a client mandate. Capgemini’s deep technology capabilities, resources and client relationships will steepen its trajectory and acceleration that would have been at a slower pace for both separately.

“Together within this sharing of a belief that solving for the challenges our clients will face in the future is only possible through the kind of visionary forward thinking that opens opportunities that aren’t yet in sight”.

Future-state problem solving and design is needed around innovation through technology

Capgemini seems to have a vision of redefining the way consulting industry thinks and works. It is bringing in global scale, leading consulting practices and the continuous implementation practices that I feel Capgemini have been developing. The Applied Innovation Exchange, recently announced by Capgemini has a great contributor to deliver on its intent with this acquisition.

Together Capgemini with Fahrenheit 212, will bring additional value and innovation to the client base, current and future, so as to expand their innovation solutions into new industries that are undergoing digital disruption.

The intent is to start with some “visionary forward thinking that opens opportunities that aren’t yet in sight” and the combination clearly stated by Fahrenheit 212 again as:

“But for the innovation discipline to be truly effective today, we must empower our creative impetus with new capabilities. Capabilities like robust software development, supply chain expertise, unique access to emerging technology and data analytics – things a few steps beyond what innovation firms are asked to do today – will soon become core requirements in the way innovation is conceived and driven to market”

The future is often limited by the constraints imposed

Fahrenheit 212 will operate within the Capgemini North American operation, perhaps far too limiting in my opinion but as a freestanding brand and group, as it certainly does have such a unique culture, team and way of working but will it be allowed to continue? Or will it simply fuse and emerge differently from its past into something more scalable, full of the need for speed, broader innovation solutions fused with a heavier technology and digital backbone? Or simply fade away drained of its creative and responsive thinking?

This acquisition certainly needs handling with real care, sensitivity and attention otherwise it can go the way of others, in their need to offer innovation, it gets simply smothered, lost and the acquirers never learn its true design force and creative value as it does not fit the existing business model.

Time will tell, I wish all involved well, it is far more an internal challenge than an external one perhaps? I do hope the traditional models around innovation are broken and a new one emerges. Capgemini have real intent at least and that is good. Who else is waking up to this change going on in innovation I wonder?

The post In the blink of an eye, it gets something bigger first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Putting that aside the website, the current point of reference, leaves me puzzled, a little unclear on its ‘compelling’ proposition. I think I get it but it simply strikes me as a launch as ‘thin,’ on really spelling it out for me, or surely the very clients, in its value and potential. It actually seems a very minimum viable product.  I just had to go in search of a better understanding.

The concept of having any “applied innovation exchange” coming from Capgemini should be promising, as somewhere to go, as they are a leading technology consulting practice. It ‘seems’ to be offering a connecting platform, well-established ecosystem advantages but it seems so understated here.

Why? It seems so tenuous, a toe in the water. I would have expected a much bigger bang here. The website told me just enough but I think it should have delivered more.

My understanding came more from the press release

So to get a better understanding I actually had to reverted to the press release and that provided more than the website in providing some improved clarity, as there seems precious little else at present. It seems they are offering a place and a digital space where others can come and play, to accelerate their innovation activities.

According to this press release AIE is “an integrated system, offering a process to rapidly and securely gain competitive advantage in today’s fast-pace innovation market landscape, by compressing cycle time from discovery to deployment of innovation“. Now that would be good news for nearly any innovation team, as they all seem to be under growing pressure to add even more speed from idea to final concept, so they can get their innovation ideas out of the door. Yet my puzzlement shifted a little here on the optimism of this.

The solutions are coming from offer spaces and “exchanges” where organizations are able to immerse themselves in the understanding, experimentation and application of all aspects of emerging technologies, as well as addressing the business disruptions confronting them and their industries”. Again my pulse moves up a notch or two on this. Although these did seem to be bricks and mortar, more than cloud and remote based.

Also they will be offering a global curated ecosystem of innovation partners and a framework of tried and tested tools to help enterprises to exploit these market disruptions in a structured way. I assume ‘the curated by’ will be by Cap Gemini as it is their Exchange.

The physical spaces they are providing are presently in Munich, Paris, Lille, Toulouse, Utrecht, Mumbai, Melbourne and now San Fransisco, followed soon by London, that will house key sectoral and process domain expertise, to allow the applications of these “innovations” to their specific business connect need. Presently these are working on different solutions for the automotive sector, virtual reality glasses, agile products and services for energy, developing applications for the French Railway (SNCF for connected watches) and a number of other examples outlined in the press release.

The promise presented in this release is also that they will provide the connecting up to other significant global technology players, most already in the Capgemini network, with the intent to build a global network of start-ups, academic institutions, research organizations, access to venture capital and private equity firms.

The promise is that this AIE ecosystem will be an operating framework constantly evolving taking a greater collaborative approach and allowing the balance between external and internal thinking to apply innovative solutions.

Returning to the web site of AIE

Here is the puzzle, I was really expecting something that underscored platforms, ecosystems, gave a greater clarification of partners, a greater story on all this physical space being offered; what was in it to play with, learn from and engagement with, but it remains “thin” and this from a leading technology consultant. The client stories help validate an (emerging) concept but does it really differ itself, in ways that make me stop and feel that this Applied Innovation Exchange is really different?

I’m not sure on what I see going back to the website, it looks like a story unfolding possibly, that might have been put together quickly or in this MVP way. It seems to have a very limited architecture or depth behind it as far as you can initially explore- for me it seems somewhat beyond a placeholder but it just does not seem to reflect a real “connected thinking” behind it, that you would expect from one of the global digital leading consulting firms.

It is speaking the language of need but I’m yet unsure of if it’s a game changer or “breaking traditional models” even though it is suggesting it is taking a multi-party collaborative approach.

Being far too cautious perhaps?

For me it is a wait and see, what about for others? I believe in platforms and written fairly extensively on these (here,and here), ecosystems (here) and (here), collaborative innovation (here) and (here), transcending different industry boundaries (here),  where consultants can contribute (here) and (here) . Equally presenting the arguments that there is this need is to shift to a new radical model (here) and are we getting real value out of the existing innovation consultants (here), which I certainly believe we are not. I felt Capgemini could have presented a more compelling and connecting story for this launch

Have Capgemini fallen into the trap that I’ve written about before (here) of “Consultants are far too cautious for their own good“ It is often harder to make internal change than providing the advice for others to make. As I assume this was all internally driven you enter the world of the typical client, lots of conflicting opinions, worries of risk, what to reveal and provide, as others are watching and can be fairly nimble if they spot something different. Maybe this is an assumption too far but it is not delivering a wow factor, yet for me.

Bridging the intent with the present deliver

So I hear you Capgemini on the intent, I would suggest the execution and launch might not be living up to this as yet. Still it is early days, or I am missing something a whole lot deeper that is failing to be conveyed in this website? .As I say, the press release gave a whole lot more than this site. Is that a good thing as it stands?

There is a real need to put some ‘red meat’ on the bone here or perhaps a seen ‘gap in the market’ might be lost to others as they can explain it better, Capgemini needs to recognize urgently this real need for a deeper understanding presently missing.

Equally internally, in consultants you have strong and diverse opinions and I would fear these potential internal antibodies kick-in and go back to the traditional practice unless they see their own compelling value, treating this as just another part of the technology service offering, an add-on, or perhaps it simply was just that, an extension to existing services?

The post Is this really breaking the traditional model on 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 am presently reading an early release draft of a book written by Mike Docherty of Venture2, on innovation, and I would certainly recommend the read when it comes out.

The book Collective Disruption will be available as of February 2015.

The book as Mike wrote to me, is aimed at corporate leaders, both in large and small companies, charged with new sources of transformative growth and makes the case for co-creating new businesses with entrepreneurial partners.

It builds on a foundation of open innovation, but is focused specifically on new business creation (vs core business support).

I know that Mike is passionate about the intersection of corporate innovation and entrepreneurship for co-creating new businesses and business models. As CEO of Venture2, a consulting and new ventures firm, he works with leading brand companies and start-ups to commercialize breakthrough new products and businesses.

Mike has experienced disruption many times.

This crisis is personal one to Mike, as he has seen and been involved in numerous points of innovation disruption.

As he states in his book: “I have been on both sides of the conference table as it (disruption) has unfolded. In my work inside and outside of big brands, I have come to know, respect, and work alongside the managers who have to make innovation work for both the company and the customer. Theirs is a serious challenge. I know because it has been and continues to be, mine as well”.

Mike was part of the turnaround team at Sunbeam Corporation some years back, who combined became really creative thinkers and they become well respected in pioneering many of the aspects of open innovation. They achieved an impressive delivery of 150 product launches in the second year by leveraging partnerships and the internal creative forces, going from the previous 10 new products in the first year.

This experience took Mike into a new direction and helped form his business evolution in his work with his venture business and boutique consulting practice, Venture2.

In his book, he clearly stated open innovation is not enough.

The core of his book is firstly arguing the old definitions of innovation are dead (this I totally agree with) and as he states new ideas are coming from everywhere, emerging competitors are disrupting established companies every day. Companies need to increasingly focus on new business creation for step-change growth.

Yet as he states, and I totally agree, this is a scary place to go for big companies, as this is transformative innovation and most are simply not good at undertaking this.

His book sets out to address that ‘soft spot’ in the big-company skill set. It is all about understanding, learning ad playing the collaborative disruption game. This he believes comes through a collective disruption model where you engage more with the entrepreneurial ecosystem to create market-disrupting businesses.

That means collaborating earlier and more deeply with partners and that’s the roadmap he’s trying to share with this book.

Mike lays out some practical approaches in each phase of corporate/start-up co-creation: discovery, definition, incubation and integration. And he supports his case with interviews and examples from some leading exponents of innovation

He offers a book for the insider of big organizations but also for the partners found outside, as well as for the many entrepreneurs that will find they are dealing with big organizations.

They need faster scale up and preparation for a successful exit, early engagement of the bigger company into the new value proposition, either threatening them or enabling them to enter into a new area of their innovation.

So this is a book that goes beyond transactional approaches and focuses on the need for relationship-based networks and a solid understanding of the innovating ecosystem, one of collective disruption for future growth.

So we are at the end of the old era of innovation?

That era did have self-imposed walls and traditional (old-fashioned) design. Today we need to build our ecosystems, seeking out partners and entrepreneurs alike. This does call for being far more disruptive, as Mike suggests in his book “Collective Disruption,” we need a new order, where you can navigate, always with some risk, into new growth opportunities by constantly learning and collaborating with others.

I would argue once you become familiar with managing in disruptive times, in working with partners all dependent on each other, in mutual and ever-increasingly ecosystems, you learn to look well beyond your old self-imposed borders.

You will suddenly see this new innovation expanse where you can begin to roam to explore increased innovation opportunities. You recognize that migration of constantly moving and change becomes essential, a necessity that gives you a greater chance to not just survive but feed off of those new innovation opportunities.

A place Mike suggests: “where you’re living the unique challenge of creating transformational and step-change growth”.

Finding that set of collaborating capabilities and competencies that can be successfully unleashed as our new innovation activities, ones that can be radically different- they create real growth. One’s where agility, lean and risk-taking become more of the norm, they are dynamic, ever evolving and changing, and so those innovation activities are richer in eventual outcomes.

A place to keep you healthy and sustaining and growing by traversing constantly across a very different, ever-changing (and challenging) landscape, than the one you left behind that also needs renewal.

For some reason reading this book triggered thoughts of the mass migration of Wildebeests in East Africa

As I was reading through the opening chapters, for some reason, it triggered a thought of the mass migration of the Wildebeest in East Africa. The old-established practices of innovation are exhausted; we do need to change our approaches and mindsets to find those new ‘feeding grounds’ of innovation.

Why this book triggered this is that disruption is becoming part of our business life, or it should be. To stay alive today or to remain healthy, you have to leverage and extract from the whole innovation ecosystem to create the different conditions; equally, you need to take increasing risks to transform and improve your chances of survival.

Watching the frantic herds of the wildebeest migration crossing the Mara River can be very spectacular; there are often scenes of great panic and confusion as the massive predator crocodiles in the river wait to pounce. Utter disruption yet necessary to survive and prosper for all involved.

For business, are these predators the consultants advising a business with often conflicting messages adding even more panic, or the entrepreneurs, who seize the ‘feeding opportunity’ to fatten up by creating the frenzy that goes with this crossing point?

When you make a significant move away from your established ‘feeding grounds’ you suddenly have such an expanse of new opportunity but it is not without risk, the risk of crossing over, recognizing the other side is essential to be the place for new, real growth.

I could not get this thinking out of my head of migrations as I continued into the book. Strange isn’t it on what sometimes does get triggered as connections as you read a book?

Are we about to witness this mass movement to find new innovation opportunities?

Mike’s book Collective Disruption certainly nudges us along, it does lay out a case for change, a contributing part of the processes and understandings that needs to ‘stir the forces’ we do need to bring about for real innovation change.

Mike, in his book, partly catches that sense of the wind of change, that is blowing and needed for innovation. Mike offers some highly practical solutions and thinking, based on his depth of knowledge and experiences within his work of approaching your need to change, with an imaginative framework to help you navigate the terrain, so as to make the necessary transition for yourself and your organization.

Innovation, certainly is for me, in real need of changing; the global forces and those competing are making the mass within our companies restless for change.

We are on the road to migration; finding new solutions built far more based on collective and disruptive approaches, that will offer far better innovation outcomes for sustaining our futures and opportunities for achieving better levels of growth we need.

The post Where are the new feeding grounds of innovation? 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.
******
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.

I named my company Agility Innovation Specialists and at its core, we state that the value of this focus can offer a real “intensity in innovation” that we believe reflects today’s world of need.

We encourage you to disrupt the accepted, to constantly challenge the current ways and push into uncomfortable territory. We suggest you seek out customers’ unmet needs, and unexplored opportunities to give a new diversity to any thinking, and then we set about accelerating these ideas to fruition. Those all need abundant and constant agility.

Many of our business organizations continue to struggle with innovation and how to make it repeatable, sustaining and transformational. Often, it seems, the more large organizations attempt to become ‘agile’ the more they seem to achieve the very opposite, of rigidity.

Finding solutions to building agility is part of the necessary answer to achieving greater innovation solutions.

Our aim is to strengthen the core by building in increasing ‘waves’ of agility within your business and enabling a stronger set of sustaining innovation outcomes.

This comes over time, from this need to have agility, flexibility, and an open enquiring mind that looks to experiment and explore, making for an agile innovator this needs diffusion across the entire organization and that does take time.

I’m always looking to explore agility and recently came across the concept of “collective agility”

Then we have collective agility

I have been reading a good academic paper recently, one that I came across in my Big Data and Cloud research I have been undertaking. The paper is called “Collective Agility, Paradox and Organisational Improvisation” by Yingqin Zheng, Will Venters and Tony Cornford found on the London School of Economics site, under the department of Management.

Their point gained from studying GridPP and its part in the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (LHC) where they observed a collective, agile and distributed performance rather than seeing ‘agility’ as small-group and deliberate systems development practices often associated with ‘agile’.

It got me curious. Here is my summary of their paper.

It certainly offers some pointers to managing in more agile ways in a complex and often disparate organization.

Collective agility is focused on the same objective: shared.
In terms of business, it means the mission is shared by all and this mobilizes each person in ways that I feel are trying agility to innovation in new ways, well for me anyway.

It is providing an environment where “unintended consequences” emerge, many positive, others less so, where random thoughts and ideas collide and through these exchanges within the community they form a “collective mindfulness” to solve these complex challenges.

Collective agility seems to require a loose coupling, not heavy structures or rules, encouraging a culture of improvisation and constant ‘tinkering’ that comes from not just intelligence, trust and pragmatism but from the knowledge that lies within the community.

Collective agility needs to have minimal structure, flexible planning, extensive communication and social bonding, all working towards this coherent, facilitated and growing feeling of making good sense (sense-making) through this coordinated but distributed network.

It is totally reliant on the interactions and attention to coordination to achieve this ‘collective mindfulness’

The big “ah-huh” for me

Collective agility is about accepting what is unpredictable and uncontrollable yet working within given boundaries, actively working upon seeking out improving performance and capability, to still perform in these circumstances of uncertainty.

Now for me, many organizations are grappling with uncertainty, volatility and unpredictable situations and resort to trying to master them in rigorous, highly disciplined ways.

This collective agility is suggesting we go the other way, we let go, hang loose but stay collectively focused by just reacting in agile ways. Does that raise some different thinking for you, it does for me.

We are seeking out improved performance but in really agile ways across a distributed community or network. Large organizations today are regretfully still tackling thorny problems in ‘given silo’s’ and this ‘collective agility’ thinking might open up our ideas about collaborating and co-creating in different ways.

It is in the combining of performances, that tackle issues in improvised ways but within a trusted and pragmatic way. It creative productive tensions, dynamics and motivating challenges and the group feel that ‘capacity for action’, motivated to combine, share and explore together to solve the problem.

Rules, structures and organized events often inhibit and feel contrived, the idea behind ‘collective agility’ is it is more natural even within the organization with established routines and strong cultures as they can bind, provide collective strength, as well as inhibit. It is seeking out the minimal structures, releasing the flexibility and bonding that can come from these routines and stronger cultures.

The when what, who, where and how collective agility is performed

According to the authors, agility can be learnt through ‘learned improvisation’ where some established tools are dropped or removed and some ‘surprise, risk and wonder’ are allowed into the exchanges.

The atmosphere of experimentation, trust, shared goals and emotional bonds provide for confidence to grow, in sharing and learning from made mistakes, as it contributes to the ‘higher’ cause of what the community is tackling within these tough problems.

The group grows in its ‘sense of pride in working and searching for a higher cause and is even willing to undertake unpopular tasks to move exchanges along. The motivation grows through this collective agility.

We often recognize improvisation and agility are more easily performed in small groups, jazz improvisation is often used to relate to this agility. The key is often the ambience and this can equally come from building out bigger communities to perform and exchange (notes)

The final thought is agility requires a mental attitude “to let go of control” to interact, to improvise but to seek to keep that sense of cohesiveness of constantly wanting to work things out, working consciously to keep moving forward towards the higher task.

Art and science fuse.

The authors suggest science becomes more like an art- visionary, experiential, passionate, agile and emergent. I’ve written about art and science before, see here “Renaissance comes from combining art and science for innovation“, so I can relate to this need to bring these two often separate practices into one again.

As I was working through this paper, replaying the conceptualization of ‘collective agility’, I liked the comment within the paper “agility for us is an expression of what people do or achieve, rather than what they might do or capabilities they hold”

Then another important part of this paper is managing the Paradoxes
They also bring out Paradoxes and provide a helpful table of these seemingly conflicting ideas or paradoxes to build ‘collective agility’ in understanding. These are based on:

1) The paradoxes of learning: “as we struggle between the comfort of the past and the uncertainty of the future which are fundamental to the process of innovation, transformation and sense-making”. Learned improvisation and reflective spontaneity.

2) The paradoxes of organising: “reflecting tensions between control and flexibility, formal and informal, integrated and differentiation denoting an ongoing process of striving for an equilibrium of often opposing forces”. Planned agility and structured chaos.

3) The paradoxes of belonging: “we strive for both self-expression and collective affiliation”…but also being “self-driven, intelligent and creative people, yet they also have an acute appreciation that success relies on collaborative effort”. Collective individuality and anxious confidence.

They finish the paper by offering useful tables highlighting some key organizational practices that help to make this collective agility work through these paradoxes.

We are constantly searching for agility to perform innovation

Agility is linked to change. Change is constantly throwing obstacles in our way. We are urged to be nimble, to react quickly, and to tackle challenges in new ways. Developing agility allows us to be in a constant ‘state’ of recognizing nothing is seemingly staying the same.

If we are feeling those around us, are all working towards the same goals, then we feel less inhibited, we may not like change but we gradually accept it. If others are reinforcing the necessary change through this ‘collective agility’ it can become a source of new hope, new discoveries, and a place for opportunity, with real excitement, full of possibilities

Gaining that critical sense of collective identity missing from many in our organizations.

By knowing “we” are collectively all working towards the same purpose, constantly having the progress mutually reinforced, allowing for clear debate but being pushed and moving forward, being allowed to freely exchange within a common purpose in ‘collective’ ways, then we are certainly are moving towards a more fluid, organizational agility.

This collective agility might alter the ways we can tackle tough problems and work in volatile environments, which then can yield in collaborative ways, solutions that are more radical and breakthroughs in innovation, something we should all be striving to achieve.

Certainly, this does offer some interesting thoughts to take collaboration and co-creation further through this collective agility concept of greater improvising.
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