Last week, Jason Breed, Social Media Practice Lead for Accenture, penned an incredibly popular - and deservedly so - article entitled Social Innovation - the Next Great Management Breakthrough that was featured here on Social Media Today. I encourage you to read his entire post, but in case time does not permit, below I summarize Jason's three main points, and then add to his macro-notion of transcending ideation, moving ideas to profitable outcomes.
Employees are expected to do more with less. The social web and this new era of consumer connectivity represents a way for brands to gain a competitive advantage while enabling them to innovate despite the fact that broad-based hiring has not resumed. Jason urges the readers to understand 3 things prior to re-thinking innovation. Please note, I am paraphrasing and consolidating his original thoughts.
- The Pace of Innovation is Rapidly Increasing - Traditional R&D departments can not sustain the pace needed for growth. This is the primary driver behind corporations turning to social innovation. Winners who adopt these social-innovation methodologies will be those who know how to convert knowledge and information into things customers actually want.
- Treating Innovation as a Process - It is difficult to determine if a particular innovation investment will result in a hit product or fail, even after serious money has been spent. An idea collection platform that generates scores of ideas can be too random for senior business leaders who desire predictability. Viewing innovation as a process that treats failure as an acceptable component of a portfolio helps to eliminate randomness.
- How to Scale - If a portfolio approach is the only way to gain the desired predictability, how can you possibly deliver enough ideas to scale? Jason bluntly suggests the answer is social innovation. The crowd's ability to create and process ideas at a huge scale makes it all possible.
He concludes that this superior gained predictability can enable a corporation to perform in ways traditionally limited to "superstar" companies like Apple and Google. Read: Can You Be as Innovative as Apple?
Clearly, I enjoyed Jason's well written piece and I feel advancing the notions he lays out is a very worthy discussion to have. Specifically, how can a company continue to utilize an Open and Directed innovation approach beyond the gathering of ideas so that they can indeed convert this gained knowledge into actionable and profitable outcomes? In addition, can a company move a product further down the innovation product life-cycle faster and on less spend than a traditional model affords?
Creating the Bridge between Social and Directed Innovation
Below I share a few examples from the world of TopCoder. Please note I reference the Competition Methodology to further this specific discussion.
Jason professes treating innovation as a process in order to re-think the entire mechanism as a portfolio with acceptable risk and greater predictability. In addition to viewing the innovation process from this portfolio lens, a Directed Innovation approach can enable companies to increase the actual number of innovative attempts, often on far less spend than a traditional model and in condensed time-lines.
Beyond the generation and evaluation of ideas, there is an array of what would be considered "Front End Innovation" competitions that allows clients to peer down the product development life-cycle much further, much faster and on less spend. This bridge, from ideas that pass the "sniff test" over and into this path of Directed Innovation, where community members with hyperspecific skills compete on aspects of projects that bring an idea to life is a crucial aspect of the TopCoder Competition Methodology and Software Development Life-Cycle (SDLC).
When Jason talks purposefully about the need for predictability, an approach that brings the potential digital product to various crucial stages faster, with a greater variety of working prototypes, on a significantly smaller spend should be an appealing one. Enabling this kind of vision can allow a company to be more selective prior to the ultimate decision of bringing a particular product to market where they will inevitably dedicate a good deal of capital. By bridging Social & Directed Innovation, you can improve speed to market while better predicting successes. Furthermore, at various stages, you can take the competition generated outputs and feed them back to your social circles to garner opinions, feedback and user sentiment. In other words, the bridge doesn't just flow in one direction, it's got two lanes and it might pay big dividends to invite your social crowd further and further down the product life-cycle.
If a social "crowd" can be an effective community to ideate your next blockbuster product, consider what a global community, equipped with hyperspecific skills can do for you when it is time to get beyond ideas and transform obtuse concepts into acute and profitable outcomes.
Many thanks to Jason Breed for spurring these thoughts. Great post Jason!
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