Tag Archives: Crowdsourcing

Innovation Not Allowed on Kickstarter?

Kickstarter Logo - No Innovation Allowed I’m in the throes of bringing The Nine Innovation Roles to life in an interactive card game for use in workshops and team meetings, and as someone who writes about harnessing external talent, it only made sense that I should post a project on Kickstarter to engage in a bit of crowdfunding to fund:

A design contest on CrowdSpring or 99Designs
The costs of an initial production run of the Nine Innovation Roles card decks.

Imagine my surprise when Kickstarter rejected my non-fiction publishing project submission.

Is innovation not allowed on Kickstarter?

I re-read the guidelines, submitted an appeal figuring there must have been some sort of mistake, and waited for a favorable response.

But, again I was surprised to receive notification that my appeal was rejected.

An email asking for clarification, in advance of this article, went unanswered.

So I am left to assume that yes, innovation is not allowed on Kickstarter. I should have seen the writing on the wall when I did a search for “innovation” on Kickstarter and it returned a nearly empty set of search results.

I guess crowdfunding the publishing of a tool to help make teams and organizations more successful at innovation wasn’t sexy or artsy enough for Kickstarter.

But, the news isn’t all doom and gloom.

Some of you may remember that I put out an open call a couple of weeks ago asking for opinions on whether I should post my design contest on CrowdSpring or 99Designs. I also tweeted the same question, and well, CrowdSpring answered one of my tweets and the folks at 99Designs didn’t. And as someone who also writes about social business, guess who I’m trusting to host the design contest for The Nine Innovation Roles card decks?

You guessed it, CrowdSpring.

Luckily, unlike Kickstarter, the folks at CrowdSpring believe in supporting innovation projects and I’ve launched a $500 design contest on their platform that is open to the world here:

I really look forward to seeing how the global community of graphic designers will interpret the Nine Innovation Roles and help me breathe life into them and create a beautiful, fun deck of cards to be used along with some interactive exercises in workshops and team meetings to increase the innovation success of teams or organizations.

Oh, and if you’re looking to fund your innovation project, you might want to invest your time somewhere else other than Kickstarter – where innovation is not allowed.

I will now be considering some secondary platforms for my crowdfunding project. Do you have any favorites?

UPDATE: I’ve launched a crowdfunding project on IndieGoGo after being rejected by Kickstarter.

Happy innovating (and designing)! 🙂

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How Leading Organizations Manage Their Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing Efforts – Part Two

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If you missed How Leading Organizations Manage Their Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing Efforts – Part One, you can find it here.

So what do leading organizations do to encourage the successful use of external talent?

They build a solid foundation:

Seek to understand where the challenges will lie in the transformation
Have passionate business owners
Secure top level support
Make a long term commitment to the use of external talent
Negotiate master agreements with external talent providers at the center
Create a common language of innovation and external talent
Implement the processes and systems to manage and measure innovation efforts

They get strategic:

Create an external talent strategy
Make a plan for achieving the strategy
Attach goals to the strategy (e.g., P&G’s 50% goal)
Communicate the goals of the strategy and measure goal achievement

They focus on communications and ownership:

Do not underestimate the importance of communications, education, and dialogue
Create guidelines for when and how to use different external talent sources
Have someone own and manage the external innovation efforts
Have owners and champions in place in different business units or product groups
Educate employees on how to engage owners and champions

They continuously reinforce their efforts:

Recognize and reward those who go outside
Weave external focus into internal systems (e.g., innovation system prompts)
Get cross-functional input into problem definition and challenge formation
Make resources available for integration
Work to make the organization more flexible and adaptable

In addition, successful organizations understand that it is about making and maintaining connections and community – you build it for when you need it, instead of building it when you need it. Successful organizations understand that attracting and managing external talent is as important as finding and hiring the best internal talent, and are changing their budget allocations to fit this new paradigm. The role of HR in the near future will not be just to recruit, develop, and manage staff, but also to build and curate talent pools. The HR profession will have to build new core competences in network orchestration and managing talent – no matter where the talent lives (inside or outside the organization). It is time to start preparing.

Before moving on to the final section, let us look at a few brief examples of different companies engaging external talent for business success and one case study of a leader pushing farther:

Threadless decided to base their whole business on external talent and build a community of designers and customers that they could leverage to come up with the t-shirt designs that they sell.

Quirky has taken the Threadless model of utilizing external talent to simultaneously make invention accessible and build a consumer products company. You submit your idea, the community curates it, the company evaluates it, and actually produces and sells the chosen inventions online, and even at a handful of retailers.

P&G went outside with a plastic technology and created a joint venture with competitor Clorox that focuses on trash bags, food storage, and related areas.

Intuit uses its Collaboratory web site to connect with entrepreneurs and to publicize their open innovation challenges, and their Labs web site to engage with the developer and customer communities to get immediate feedback on some of their experiments in order to engage in some level of co-creation.

Psion Teklogix has built one of the more robust corporate open innovation communities – Ingenuity Working – complete with a video from their CEO front and center.

SAP has started The Global SAP Co-Innovation Lab Network (aka COIL) with HP, Intel, NetApp, Cisco, VMware, and F5 Networks to facilitate project-based co-innovation with its members and to enhance the capabilities of SAP’s partner and customer ecosystem through an integrated network of world-wide expertise and best-in-class technologies and platforms.

MyStarbucksIdea.com is an example of engaging the creative energy outside your organization that most companies will not want to follow. They throw things wide open for all idea submissions, not focused on any particular challenges, for all to see. As a result, Starbucks exposes the company to the risk of brand equity destruction from not following through on suggestions. At the same time, this approach provides free market research for competitors and creates a lot of sifting and communications work for internal resources.

If you missed How Leading Organizations Manage Their Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing Efforts – Part One, you can find it here.

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Should I use 99Designs or Crowdspring?

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I’m working to get a card deck, posters, and a mobile app designed for my Nine Innovation Roles and I have a simple question for my readers out there:

Do you think I should use 99Designs or Crowdspring for my design challenge?

Or does someone out there already have an awesome design idea for a deluxe tarot-style approach for the visuals to go with my Nine Innovation Roles product offerings?

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How Leading Organizations Manage Their Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing Efforts – Part One

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How Leading Organizations Manage Their Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing Efforts - Part One Although there are simple and cost effective ways to jumpstart your efforts – for example, leveraging a company like InnoCentive to host prize-based challenges in order to rapidly find solutions to your most pressing problems – leading organizations that wish to truly embrace open innovation and crowdsourcing do so through careful planning. When seeking to engage external talent, one of the first of many questions you must first ask yourself is: Why are we doing this? What do we hope that external talent can achieve for us that our internal talent cannot (or should not) achieve, and how do we integrate the two together?

The second question leading organizations in open innovation ask themselves is: Why will they care? And one good place to start in answering this difficult question is to ask: What kind of organization do you have? Do you have a product-driven organization like Microsoft that is very much organized around products? Do you have a customer-driven organization like Hallmark that is organized around customer moments instead of around products? Or do you have a purpose-driven organization? While it does not technically matter what kind of organization you have, the key is to find something that not just your employees will engage with, but that your customers and partners will engage with as well. This could be purpose, but it could also be love for a brand or a well-designed, emotionally-connected product.

Other questions to ask:

In our organization, where does open innovation fit in our overall innovation efforts?

How are we looking to connect?

Do we want to build our own proprietary global sensing network that allows us to pull together insights and ideas from lots of different types of sources in different locations?

Or, do we want to utilize external service providers like InnoCentive to get up and running faster or go wider than our own proprietary networks can go?

Are we looking for crowd labor or creativity, or are we looking to engage in open innovation or civic engagement in creating innovative solutions?

Are we looking for possible solutions to problems that we have already identified?

Are we looking with current and potential suppliers at the intersection of what is needed and what is possible?

Or, are we looking more broadly to identify new insights through which we can drive our innovation efforts?

Note that one must be careful not to become too focused on ideas. Great ideas fail all the time – poor value translation, poor value access, poor timing, and so on. Rather, getting to creative solutions to problems and challenges is key to innovation success.

Another important questions is: What tool is best for this problem? We have all heard the saying that if you have a hammer every problem looks like a nail. Well, when it comes to open innovation and crowdsourcing, there are lots of tools that we can use, but only if we first understand the nature of the work we are trying to get done. Is it a creative piece of work that we can put out to a community like 99Designs? Or do we just need someone to help us temporarily through a place like PeoplePerHour? Or, perhaps we are trying to solve problems, both big and small, and want to leverage a company like InnoCentive to create and tap into both internal and external communities of problem solvers to accelerate our innovation efforts.

Smart organizations identify the different work and challenge scenarios they expect to face over time and then identify which resourcing option(s) make the most sense for each scenario. They then work to form the relationships and agreements necessary with firms like InnoCentive to make sure that they will have reliable resources in place for when they seek to utilize a particular type of resource to tackle the matching challenge or work scenario.

Successful organizations have a plan for how they are going to interface with external resources and how they are going to bring ideas and potential solutions in house for further development and launch. What will the cultural obstacles be? You must consider what the potential cultural obstacles might be to engaging external talent in your organization. P&G had to work very hard to change of its culture from ‘Not Invented Here’ to one where people embrace new things being ‘Proudly Found Elsewhere.’

Some of the reasons that you may face resistance in implementing an external talent strategy include beliefs that career advancement comes from increasing the number of headcount managed, a fear of failure, a lack of management support, and people not wanting to go outside their comfort zones (‘I get paid to manage and make things incrementally better’). But when people start to hear stories about some of the successes, see some proof of the benefits, and see other people get recognized for utilizing external talent, acceptance of an external talent strategy starts to spread. And when senior leadership or middle management start talking about what is being done with external talent, and people using external talent start training their peers on what they are doing, you know people are starting to fully embrace your external talent strategy.

If you want to read How Leading Organizations Manage Their Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing Efforts – Part Two, you can find it here or…

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