Originally posted at Trends in the Living Network on July 26th, 2010

MyCustomer.com has just published a nice article based on an interview with me, titled Ross Dawson: Six tools to kickstart your crowdsourcing strategy.

After beginning with some background on the topicality of crowdsourcing, the article goes on:

But suddenly crowdsourcing seems to be reaching some kind of critical mass. From reports that Microsoft crowdsourced the making of Office 2010, to David Cameron asking the UK’s civil servants for money-saving ideas via the Government’s Spending Challenge, it’s not just that interest in it is peaking, it’s that organisations are already bringing crowdsourcing plans to fruition.

This all comes as no surprise to Ross Dawson, a globally recognised futurist, strategy advisor and best-selling author – and at last month’s Creative Sydney event he delivered a keynote entitled ‘The Future is Crowdsourcing’.

“We are now at the opening phases of what is a global talent economy,” he explains. “Talent is now everywhere and far more available. We’re seeing professionals increasingly working independently rather than necessarily in large corporations; we are seeing retired people who are interesting in continuing to be engaged and entrusted to projects. And clearly we have access to people around the world. So we are moving from a world where the talent was all inside big organisations to a very fluid world where the talent is available globally. And there is now a whole host of tools and platforms to be able to access all of this talent in a wide variety of ways.”

After running through some of the examples I gave in the interview, including Procter & Gamble’s embrace of open innovation, IBM’s alphaWorks initiative, and Dell’s IdeaStorm, the article goes on to highlight six of the 14 categories of crowdsourcing described in my recently launched Crowdsourcing Landscape, quoting me extensively from our interview and mentioning companies that were covered in our landscape.

Here are the six types of crowdsourcing mentioned in the article, together with excerpts of what I was quoted saying about the category. See the excellent article for complete details.

1. Distributed innovation platforms
“They find more than half the people that solve the challenges on Innocentive and these other distributed innovation platforms already know the answer. So why should they solve that problem again when they can find someone else who already knows the answer?”

2. Idea platforms
“These sometimes go under the guise of idea management software, but these are ones where people inside organisations – often – submit ideas or proposals for cost savings, or new products, or new services, or process efficiencies, and then they collectively assess and rate and vote on and select and evolve and refine and build on those ideas to become the innovation that will drive that organisation forward.”

3. Innovation prizes
“Anybody anywhere can enter their own projects and ideas, others can vote on them and build on them and use the wisdom of the crowd to make them more effective, and from all of those submissions somebody wins a quarter of a million dollar prize.”

4. Content markets
No direct quotes from me - Threadless and Red Bubble are mentioned.

5. Prediction markets
“For enterprise software companies it is notoriously difficult to forecast sales. For many reasons, the sales pipeline that is put into CRM systems is often inaccurate. However, if you then ask the salespeople to predict what the sales are going to be for that quarter and you aggregate all of their opinions, you can get a far more accurate view of what the actual sales are going to be.”

6. Competition platforms
No direct quotes from me - DesignCrowd, CrowdSpring and Guerra Creativa are mentioned.

Ross Dawson is a leading futurist, keynote speaker, author, and Chairman of the Advanced Human Technologies group.

When talking about crowdsourcing, co-creation and innovation, very rarely do “baby boomers” enter the conversation as the target audience. However, a new Neilson report sheds light on the untapped potential of this populous generation. Interestingly, over 1/3 of users online are Boomers. Moreover, they use the same communication and social media platforms as younger adults. They are, on average, more affluent than Millennials and spend online readily. Leveraging, measuring interest, and co-creating with this generation via crowdsourcing is a great way to both engage and build your brand with Boomers. Here are a few ideas the Chaordix team has thought up for how the boomer and beyond demographic might be leveraged as a crowdsourcing community.

Co-creating new vacation products
As boomers retire, they’ll be looking for vacation ideas, getaways, escapes, cruises and guided tours. By leveraging crowdsourcing to search out and test new vacation products to appeal to a young-at-heart crowd, potential for product innovation and therefore a competitive edge is high. This could help online booking companies offer unique products and packages specifically tailored to a demographic that now has more time and money to travel than ever before.

Developing new financial products
Many retirees (or potential retirees) are looking to investments to create income and wealth as they enjoy their retirement. In leveraging a crowd and listening to what their retirement looks like now companies can create investment opportunities, insurance products or other financial products and moreover build relationships with affluent potential customers.

Advising your business on retaining their Boomer Generation employees
Who better to tell you how to keep your employees from retiring (or worse, exercising early-retirement) when you need them than those who sit at that very cusp? By leveraging a Boomer Generation employee community to advise how what would keep them in the workplace longer, companies can stave off brain drain and buy time for their younger employees grow more experienced.

Developing websites better suited for Boomer Generation audiences
Let’s face it: the generation of digital natives (read: Millenials & late Gen Xers) see the world differently, having grown up in a world where they are inundated with information, blinking imagery and constant calls for their attention. As such they read the world differently, scanning rather than taking time to absorb information when reading, sporadically searching instead of reading traditionally (left to right, top to bottom). And many websites are designed as both a response and result of the way digital natives take the world in. But with the huge adoption of the affluent & tech savvy Boomer Generation, making websites Boomer friendly should be a priority to any company looking to build relationships with this cohort. Through a crowdsourcing community of Boomers, businesses can develop sites to best appeal to this generation, and go beyond generating leads to generating sales.

These are just a few ideas of how businesses can leverage a crowdsourcing Boomer generation, in the most general and obvious terms. With all that said, if you’ve got a company and want to reach out to this generation online, give us a shout, and we’d love to throw some ideas to you.

Photo credit: X-Ray Delta One

Originally posted at Innovation Leadership Network on July 8, 2010

I’ve just finished reading a nice article on IP strategy and open innovation that was published in the MIT Sloan Management Review last year. It’s worth reading because the authors, Oliver Alexy, Paula Criscuolo and Ammon Salter have been doing research in this area for a while and now have a good corpus of evidence about how to successfully manage open innovation. I’ve written a blog post previously on one of Ammon’s papers where he talks about the Gollum effect, where obsessive IP protection shuts down the possibilities for valuable innovation partnerships.

The main point of the paper is that some organizations obsess about IP with a ‘one size fits all’ approach, which disables innovation. Universities in particular are becoming notorious for this and it is having a detrimental effect, as the authors explain.

For example, Rolls Royce plc finds that it takes 18 months to negotiate a research collaboration agreement with a university partner; having routinely experienced such delays, the company is considering whether to terminate its extensive network of university research centres altogether.

Obviously, if enough IP is patented then there will eventually be something of value that may become a ‘blockbuster’ product. However, as Tim has observed before, a patent is not a business model and the costs of holding and maintaining all this unproductive IP are staggering. In the US, 99% of all patent-licensing revenue can be attributed to 40% of patents. The main beneficiaries of the remaining 60% are the patent attorneys and at the level of firms this poor use of IP results in the destruction of shareholder value.

Siemens and Proctor and Gamble for example, recently reported that they use a mere 10% of their patents but nevertheless pay millions in annual renewal fees for the remaining 90%. In addition, all the IP they have generated can create patent thickets that inhibit potential collaborators.

So bad IP strategy can destroy value, but how can IP be aligned with successful open innovation? According to the MIT Sloan Review, IP can disable open innovation when:
* One-size-fits-all approaches, such as “no patents no talk” predominate
* IP and open innovation strategies are disconnected
* Lawyers are a roadblock to open innovation, dictating the who, when and how
* There is a “patent everything” outlook
* IP is treated as an end in itself
* IP builds fences through the hoarding of patents and excessive secrecy

However, IP can be an enabler of open innovation when:
* IP management is adaptable
* IP and open innovation strategies are integrated
* Lawyers help pave the way for cooperation
* Smart patenting – which involves only valuable inventions -prevails
* IP is seen as an opportunity for value creation and the building of ecosystems
* IP is available to others and, through licensing and cooperation, is likely to be profitable

In summary, IP protection can be useful when it is part of an open business model rather than a substitute for a business model. Rather than a trench to stop competition and extract rents, IP becomes a vehicle for communication and collaboration, as the authors suggest:

Generally, intellectual property is beneficial to open innovation when it is used as a signaling device than as a control right.

Photo by Jim Kuhn

Originally posted at Blogging Innovation on June 17th, 2010

3GTV is the brainchild of Automated Media Services, and they are putting little screens in stores right next to products they promote and show commercials for those products. The notion of having what amounts to a tiny TV screen next to the Kraft Macaroni & Cheese would have sounded bizarre 20 years ago, not just because of cost, more because we didn’t think of TV screens being in very many places. Screens are everywhere today (mostly because of the low cost) and so we are less surprised to see them at restaurants and in elevators, etc.

As it stands, the 3GTV service that’s set to launch later in the year is a huge breakthrough because it’s really the first time consumers are TV-pitched at the very moment they are deciding which product to buy, the so-called “moment of truth” and the bottom of the sales funnel. So stores and manufacturers and advertisers will get real time data about the impact, which will probably be at least worth the trouble for the advertisers. So that in and of itself is a big deal and that’s why Stuart Elliott wrote Showing TV, and Commercials, on the Shelves and in the Aisles in The New York Times today.

But I think this is a much bigger deal than that because I think 3GTV is going to end up being the gateway to some much cooler stuff, tapping into the great rethinking that alice.com has done, but also making social networking sites like Foursquare much more interesting as a business. Currently Foursquare makes me want to utter something that’s more likely to come out of the mouth of Rahm Emanuel (and then offend Sarah Palin) because it really doesn’t let you do anything useful.

As Alice.com has figured out, most manufacturers don’t care to learn our names. Just knowing our age, gender, and ZIP code is what they want to know so that they can get more targeted in their marketing and product R&D. People using sites like Foursquare allow you to “check in” to a location and not that much else, but if you can now marry that information in real time with the 3GTV, then next step in the techno-evolutionary chain is that Kraft is going to know that (if it’s me) a 44 year-old male from the 98144 ZIP code just entered the store and they will know in my case that I don’t ever buy macaroni & cheese so I am not a very good target, but the next person to check in happens to buy it a lot, then Kraft (or the store) may want to flash a coupon on the screen that that consumer can “pick up” with an app on their iPhone (I could pick it up too if I saw it, but I would ignore it), or the coupon can be sent to their mobile phone (still all anonymous – PayPal figured that out). Then at checkout all of that gets reconciled (that isn’t elegant today, but I am sure someone is already hard at work writing that software).

Personalized, location-based advertising and coupon-ing is coming soon, and every shop from Safeway to Shultzy’s Sausage stand will benefit. Helping the big guys is interesting, but to be able to scale down to the mom and pop shops is where this starts to become gigantic. For the big guys, it allows them to more actively manage their inventory. If they know the ad or the coupon is going to lift sales of a given product, they know when to stock more of it. Even bigger, when inventory is time-sensitive, Shultzy’s may have pre-cooked 20 hot dogs for lunch, and as the lunch hour winds down, they still have nine left, they can push out coupons for the last ones to people walking by (that gets beyond Foursquare’s store idea, but it should also be easy to check in to a neighborhood). At the point if the alternative to not selling them is throwing them away due to spoilage, then Shultzy’s might send coupons for a free hot dog knowing that they will at least probably sell a soft drink and get some money. The same spoilage issue works really well for grocery stores when produce and meats are getting to the end of their shelf life. Really powerful.

Now things are really cooking with connecting marketers with consumers once we get this rolling. My guess is that Groupon, the ridiculously (their word, kind of) successful coupon company that just closed a $135 million round of financing will be in the mix. Add them to the list of “I wish I had thought of that!”

Great marketing innovation that will lead to even bigger ones.

This last week, an independently organized TEDX-style convention was held in Washington, DC. TEDxOilSpill began on Monday with the sole purpose to bring to focus possible solutions for the 40,000 barrel-a-day problem in the Gulf of Mexico.

Bringing together expert opinion and broadcasting globally, the conference was the product of the crowd trying to do what a government, tied down with bureaucracy, and a private company, clearly stretched beyond capacity, could not.

It was the culmination of over 70 days of public chatter – of tweeting, emailing, blogging, liking, donating and broadcasting. It carried the conversation and focused it, pulling out the most pertinent answers to address the most immediate need.

It was also the perfect place for the X Prize Foundation (best known for the Ansari X Prize, which granted a $10 million dollar bounty to the first private organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into outer orbit twice in two weeks) to announce that it will launch a $10 million dollar prize for solutions to clean up the Gulf.

Beyond talking about answers, there is now impetus for non-governmental parties to step up and execute the solutions they’ve been given a forum to speak about.

This is the pinnacle of crowdsourcing: assembling a crowd, posing questions to them, getting solutions from them, and empowering them to implement them.

We’ve talked about crowdsourcing most recently in very practical terms – how it is co-created market research, or how it can used to gain significant insight into your employees, business or market, or simply a better way to innovate. All of these are great reasons for organizations to get onto the crowdsourcing bandwagon. With that said, the potential for crowdsourcing goes far beyond profit and market; crowdsourcing as a platform can address problems we could never solve in isolation. This is the product of living in an age of information and interconnectedness – we now have the ability to not only share information, but empower the crowd to make the solutions a reality.

We’ve recently had the privilege to toot our horn about our involvement with Global Voices – an initiative that’s working to save the lives of women and children in the most impoverished countries. Like TEDxOilSpill and the new X Prize to address the oil in the Gulf, it goes beyond the market, the business, or finding new revenue streams. They’re proof of an emerging trend – how crowdsourcing can change the world we live in profoundly, to create a future for our children that’s better than our present, or a find ways to address seemingly impossible problems.

And we’re glad to be a part of it all.

photo by Pinar Ozger

In 2006, I visited Kyoto for the first time. After walking a couple of kilometers, I realized I was far from my intended destination. Without a map, I was lost. Only after retracing my steps did I realize the map I had seen was not oriented North/South. On this map, North was down and to the right – clearly to the cartographer, another perspective was more important to emphasize.

To solve complex problems, innovators go through a similar process of wayfinding and navigating. To innovate solutions to problems we haven’t seen before, we often need to learn to see old things in new ways. Converging on the true nature of the problem, navigating ambiguity and uncovering the insights that drive innovative solutions, we need to become more comfortable leaving old maps behind and finding new ways of navigating.

In the children’s game “warmer – cooler” the seeker receives feedback after every step or two. Using constant feedback as a guide, the seeker begins to converge on the object of her quest, without prior knowledge of her destination.

Often, the solution we seek is in plain view, but remains unseen until our perspective shifts and we feel an “ah-ha!” flash of insight. As George Kembel, Executive Director of the Stanford d.school puts it – we know we have found an insight when we discover something that is both resonant and unexpected.

Innovation is often a social endeavor. Crowdsourcing enables us to converge on shared understanding of the problem, and using this shared frame, explore different avenues to arrive at innovative solutions. Like the Kyoto cartographer, each of us brings our own personal orientation to the problem at hand. Through the act of social wayfinding — using social tools to make our understanding transparent to others and providing us with the constant “warmer / cooler” feedback we need to rapidly iterate and refine ideas, we can use the interplay of diverse perspectives to reveal innovative solutions to complex problems.

Erin Liman, Director of Social Business Innovation, SAP

This past week Chaordix was represented at the WorldBlu 2010 Awards in Vegas.

The event was to honour those who made the 2010 list (we did ) and to hear first hand stories amongst the honourees about what makes their company democratic. A complete list of the companies that made the 2010 WorldBlu list is available here

To compete for a spot on the WorldBlu list, your company – in fact our entire team – completed a survey on how we performed against The WorldBlu 10 Principles of Organizational Democracy

1. Purpose and Vision
2. Transparency
3. Dialogue + Listening
4. Fairness + Dignity
5. Accountability
6. Individual + Collective
7. Choice
8. Integrity
9. Decentralization
10. Reflection + Evaluation

This is a daunting list of principles to live by.

The event day ended with a keynote from Tony Hsieh, Author of Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose and CEO, Zappos.com.

My favourite quote of the day was from Tony Hsieh:

core values, have them, commit to them – hire by them and fire by them.

I was inspired by what I heard… and to be honest it made me realize that even at Chaordix as an awardee, where through our crowdsourcing solution we enable democratization in the workplace, we ourselves…have much work to do to become more democratic.

So Team Chaordix – what are our core values?

Team WorldBlu – Traci, Miranda & Sam – thanks for including us, we’ll be back next year!

Originally posted at Convince & Convert on June 23rd, 2010 with some great discussion.

What is the next generation of crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing is evolving beyond the shiny contest model (Doritos’ “Crash the Super Bowl”) and into something more meaningful to the brands embracing it and the consumers contributing to it. There is no better ‘bang’ for your buck than a well thought out and properly executed crowdsourcing initiative.

Market research is as important to most companies as the payroll department. Yet, it seems to be a stagnant mode of gathering feedback. Surveying, physical and online focus groups and opinion polling are still the primary tactics companies depend upon for market prediction and go to market strategy. It is uni-directional, as static as a physical newspaper, and it assumes the company seeking quality answers is asking the right questions.

This is where crowdsourcing comes in.

The 3 C’s of Next Generation Crowdsourcing: Co-Creation, Constant, and Control

Co-Creation

There are people out there that love your product. Embrace these people. There are people out there that currently hate your product because it isn’t giving them what they need. Embrace these people as well. After the socially awkward embracing is done, invite both groups in during the creative process. I’m not talking about a contest to produce a full commercial or send a manned vehicle to space. That’s last year. I mean putting in place a method that allows your consumers to contribute in a variety of ways, most often rather easily with immediate recognition of the contribution.

Some people are amazing at bold ideation, while others are better at refining and iterating something previously suggested. Some simply want to vote or rank what they find appealing, and others; well they just like to hang out to see what’s up.

The output from co-creation can be a market test and sharper go-to-market strategies, so you know what your consumers want before you take it to market. It can also be a real product – something your internal R&D lab hadn’t thought about that your consumers are clearly calling for.

Not all innovation or improvements to existing products and services are going to come from your crowd, nor should they by any means. But the communication lines do need to be in place so that when brilliance is spoken, you are listening. Effective crowdsourcing delivers exactly this and it can super-charge your social media efforts along the way.

Constant

As crowdsourcing evolves, we’ve learned that initial efforts had a defined end date, and the vast majority of energy, buzz, and brand-love dissipated over a short stretch of time. We know better now. Next generation crowdsourcing involves multiple initiatives, sometimes cross-brand, often cross-vertical, happening in parallel and offering the user a constant steam of new involvement opportunities.

Micro-tasks are a great example of this. Next-generation crowdsourcing always recognizes effort via reward, social status, and incentives that are meaningful to the user. Think frequent flyer program, but without having to go through airport security to attain the rewards. As the ability to deliver these tasks via mobile meshes with geo-location technologies and intelligent advertising, this ‘C’ of the three C’s will truly blossom and become powerful for the brands that get it right.

Control

Crowdsourcing, much like focused social media efforts, isn’t about giving up control, even though it seems that way before you start, just ask Scott Monty of Ford. (He doesn’t know me, so please don’t actually ask…) Do you think Ford has more or less ‘control’ of their current and future brand image today versus five years ago?

Compared to before, this company is holding the reigns – albeit loosely and in new ways. They have found that crucial balance between having an open consumer rapport, yet skillfully herding the masses to participate in ways that are beneficial to the brand and the company’s bottom line. They have nimbly created a social “choose your own adventure” for their consumers, who by the way tend to grab 3 friends and bring them along for the ride.

I would argue that Ford should go leagues further, by embracing a consistent crowdsourcing approach that constantly empowers consumers (and would-be consumers) of all Ford vehicles with opportunities to co-create, relevantly share and earn legitimate rewards that drive loyalties and purchasing habits for years to come.

If you can begin a crowdsourcing initiative in 2010, and that contributor purchases a new Ford in 2013 because she has accrued a “Digital Down Payment” along the way due to her consistent and quality participation, is that not ultimate control of the consumer’s purchasing habits?

Now, take this a step further, you buy a new car once every 3 – 6 years, but how often do you buy a cup of coffee and a bagel?

Brands need to stop viewing crowdsourcing and open innovation strategies as ‘giving up creative control’ and rather understand what this really is – co-created market research that is more accurate. When adroitly coupled with ongoing social strategies, next generation crowdsourcing offers a remarkable way to help deliver happy, impassioned, and loyal consumers.

As Chaordix understands, unleashing human potential in the workplace is a delicate balance between two seemingly oppositional human needs. On one hand, all of us want to have the freedom to be in control of our own environment and have a say in determining the shape of the world around us. And alongside our need for freedom, there is an equally pressing human desire – for structure, for clarity of purpose, and for a sense of order to the world in which we live and work.

These two universal needs – for freedom on one hand, and structure on the other – are particularly relevant to business leaders, who must strike the right balance between the two in order to create healthy, high-functioning work environments. And although tools like Chaordix are essential resources, they alone are insufficient to transform the culture of an organization.

In my years as an organizational change consultant, I have witnessed scores of leaders that choose, consciously or unconsciously, to value one of these needs at the expense of the other. But I wrote my newest book to deliver a simple message: We do not need to choose. It is possible – indeed, essential – to find the right organizational balance between individual freedom and group structure. In fact, research confirms that when organizational leaders do so, they create optimal conditions for ongoing learning, motivation and engagement.

Now, more than ever, people are clamoring for these sorts of work environments. We need places that provide employees with well-structured spaces in which to discover what they care most deeply about. We need workplaces where adults work collaboratively to identify innovative solutions and uncover better ways of satisfying the bottom line. And we need workplaces that strategically harness the power of crowdsourcing to generate a collective intelligence far superior to the work of any individual or workgroup.

All of us – whether we are CEOs, customers, or staff members – must become more attuned to these tensions, and to the individual and group needs of the people around us. When we do so, we create the types of businesses that confer not just a place to go to work in the morning, but also a place to strategically harness the power and uniqueness of each person’s voice.

Sam Chaltain is a DC-based educator and organizational change consultant. He works with schools, school districts, and public and private sector companies to help them create healthy, high-functioning learning environments. To learn more, please contact Sam directly:

Sam Chaltain
Democracy. Learning. Voice.
703 851 7826
http://www.samchaltain.com
http://twitter.com/samchaltain

It isn’t every day that I’m willing to sit through a talk on leading a culture of innovation. It isn’t that I think I know everything already, but more that I’m keen to learn new things and often leave disappointed.

However, Sir Ken Robinson shared stories, kept the crowd entertained and dropped some knowledge on me. I realized, while listening to how Sir Ken and his wife renewed their vows at the Elvis wedding chapel in Vegas that being a smart innovative person isn’t something that happens to a few lucky people. Everyone is equally creative, we just have to allow that creativity to blossom.

Here are two examples from Sir Ken’s Nevada themed talk that helped me realize the magic of open innovation is that every one of us is an innovator.

Aside from being a humorous anecdote, Sir Ken brought up his Las Vegas vows because Las Vegas is a testament to the power of imagination. Given that Las Vegas rose out of nothing, blaming a lack of resources is not an acceptable excuse. Instead of thinking of anything as a barrier, think of possibilities. He brought up the term divergent thinking, which is really just not taking anything for granted to come up with many possible ways forward.

Death Valley is the hottest and driest place in North America. Not much of a surprise, it got it’s name because nothing grows there. However, over the winter of 2005 there were flashfloods. The following spring saw the most amount of wildflowers to grow there ever. Sir Ken’s point? If the conditions are wrong, life protects itself and hunkers down. If the conditions are right, life flourishes.

To summarize, Sir Ken’s talk was really about one thing. To lead a culture of innovation, your job is not to have great ideas, but to create conditions in which *others* have great ideas.