Category Archives: collaboration

Leveraging External Talent for Innovation

How Leading Organizations Manage Their Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing Efforts

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:

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

2. How are we looking to connect?

3. 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?

4. 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?

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

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

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

8. 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.

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

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Moving from Talent Ownership to Talent Attraction

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Moving from Talent Ownership to Talent Attraction

In our hyper-competitive, always-connected world, organizations are increasingly becoming focused on improving both their speed to market and their revenue per headcount. In this environment, more senior leaders every day are seeing innovation as the primary way to gain competitive advantage and to simultaneously increase revenue and cut costs. At the same time, organizations are struggling to find ways to accelerate their pace of innovation without escalating their costs faster than their budgets will allow.

The increasing demands for speed and efficiency are causing organizations to become ever more virtual and flexible, to utilize more variable resources, and to add and shed employees with greater regularity (often with both happening in the same organization at the same time). The progressively dynamic nature of the workforce inside organizations is making it more difficult for organizations to attract, develop, and retain the best talent while simultaneously meeting the fiscal realities of the business. This is causing many organizations to move from a talent ownership mindset to a talent attraction mindset. In a talent ownership world, recruitment and the hiring transaction are king. But in a talent attraction world, successful organizations are those that master the art of building and maintaining talent communities that keep talent connected to the organization even when they are not employed by it. Consciously creating an external talent strategy is therefore essential to success.

The talent market relationship changes are not just happening at the individual level. Change is also happening at the organizational level, as organizations themselves are moving from a fortress mentality, where all work is secret and kept inside the organization’s four walls, to an integrated, global economy with an interconnected web of suppliers and distribution channels – where being the partner of choice in your industry will be increasingly important.

Silicon Valley icon Bill Joy once famously said, “There are always more smart people outside your company than within it.” In this new world of work, organizations must begin accepting that the most valuable employees will now be those that not only do good work, but who also serve as a force multiplier for their organizations by being good at organizing and orchestrating the innovation efforts of others who do not even work for the company. And ideally, you will want to evolve to a place where even those who do not work for you actually want to work with you. In this brave new world, you must have strategies in place for attracting both internal and external talent to your innovation efforts.

Section 1. Why Having an External Talent Strategy is Becoming Increasingly Important

The old way of winning the talent wars was to search for and hire the very best talent and keep them inside your own four walls by offering them competitive compensation, benefits, and perks. Your hope was that your talent is better than your competitors’ talent. But over the last couple of decades, companies have increasingly found that employees who pursue what they do with passion will outperform an employee with a gun to their head every time. Circuit City learned very publicly that people are not commodities and went out of business from treating them as if they were. At the same time, we know that diversity is very important and hard to foster internally. And so it is to get to this diversity of thought in order to accelerate product launch and innovation timelines that companies must open up – it is a global economy with a global talent pool.

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Think ‘Out of Four Walls’

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Think 'Out of Four Walls' I had coffee with a clever marketing and sales consultant recently and one of the topics we discussed was the impact of location on a group’s ability to innovate. At the time we spoke about getting people to think in new ways by getting people to think in new places. That is to say that if you always meet in the same places to try and be creative as a team, don’t you ultimately get the same types of thinking? In other words, do you hit a creativity plateau by meeting in the same places all the time?

That of course is part of the reason that companies have off-sites, but I would argue further that the “same places” includes the typical locations for off-sites. I would argue that if you are trying to get people to think differently that you have to take people to an unusual, unexpected location. I would argue that you announce one location for the meeting that you have no intention of going to, get everybody to assemble there, and then go somewhere else. What this achieves is that in the time leading up to the meeting people start preparing mentally for what to expect and how things will go, but then when they show up and you announce you are going somewhere else, you will generate buzz and excitement, the walls of expectation will come tumbling down and you will get people to begin thinking in a different way than they were prepared to think.

That is only half the battle though. My next recommendation would be to pre-arrange for people to bring portable seating with them or bring it for everyone yourself. Then if you are trying to get new thinking, get radical but relevant. For the approach I am to suggest, you must keep the groups small, tailored to the venue you select (you don’t want to be asked to leave, or at least not too quickly).

For example, salespeople for BestBuy who are trying to figure out how to do things differently might go meet in an auto dealership, or a Nordstrom’s, or a 7-eleven. Find a place out of the way and start your meeting. If asked to leave, have your meeting on the sidewalk outside or in the parking lot (going back inside as needed). The site you choose should be related to your business but not directly related – notice Circuit City was not an example.

The site could also however be related to your topic. A meeting to talk about how to better understand what customers want could be held at a busy intersection with stop lights in case you wanted to ask real people what they think. Just please make sure to be careful and not get yourself run over when trying to ask people questions(stay on the sidewalk).

If you meet at someone else’s business, please try to choose a slow time of day and stay off to the side and out of the way. If you’re looking for more “natural” thinking, then meeting in the woods, by a river, or on a hill can also be good. Regardless of where you choose to meet, just be sure to debrief at the site, or literally just outside your own building before returning to work.

If you try this approach to uncovering new thinking I think you will be pleasantly surprised, and I would love it if you send in your stories and photographs of different unusual places you meet and what the topic for the meeting was. I look forward to seeing your “Out of Four Walls” thinking!

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What is Your External Talent Strategy?

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What is Your External Talent Strategy? I am currently doing research for a white paper and a webinar on harnessing the global talent pool to accelerate innovation, and I need your help to add to the case studies I’ve already gathered. Here is the premise:

As more industries become commoditized and innovation becomes more of a focus, organizations are being forced to move beyond a talent ownership mindset to a talent attraction and engagement mindset.

There are many reasons for this. In the United States this includes a growing percentage of researchers approaching retirement age and post 9/11 immigration policies that make it increasingly difficult for foreigners to come to this country to study and work. The intersection of an aging scientific workforce, tighter immigration policies, and a growing need for innovation to reinvigorate the economy is causing more organizations to make plans to engage talent outside their four walls. But this is not just an American problem…

Forward-thinking organizations are now seeking to harness the growing numbers of retired scientists, unemployed experts, and underemployed talent around the world to generate ideas, solve problems, and further the goals of the business.

This begs the question:

What is your organization’s external talent strategy?

Or, how does your organization plan to leverage the brains outside your four walls to achieve its goals?

Please leave a comment or contact me to share your story.

I’ll be sharing the results of my research and my thinking in a FREE webinar on December 13, 2011 and then later in a white paper in the new year.

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Nine Innovation Roles – A New Tool

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In my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, one of the last tools I ended up adding has turned out to be one of the most intriguing parts of the book for people – especially in helping to build successful innovation teams. That tool is the Nine Innovation Roles, which I have written about before on this blog.

Now, after my latest innovation speech at the Farm Credit Services of America in Omaha, Nebraska and some conversations I had with the leadership there, it has become clear that people would like to have some additional tools to use to help identify which roles people tend towards on their teams so that they can use these tendencies as talking points and possibly to help organize effective innovation teams.

Nine Innovation Roles - A New Tool One of the things that was discussed as a possibility was having team members fill out a simple worksheet to identify what roles they believe their teammates tend towards, while also self-identifying themselves. If the whole team were to complete this exercise it should yield some interesting and actionable data.

But why stop there with one organization?

I truly believe in the power of the Nine Innovation Roles, and because of this belief I’ve created and uploaded a simple worksheet for people to use. I only ask one thing in return from those who download and use the worksheet.

Please send info at braden kelley dot com the data you collect (without the names)

In exchange I will collect it and share it in aggregate at the end of every quarter

YOU MUST DOWNLOAD THE WORKSHEET FOR IT TO BE USEFUL

In case you missed it, the Nine Innovation Roles are:

Revolutionary
Artist
Troubleshooter
Conscript
Connector
Customer Champion
Judge
Magic Maker
Evangelist

In addition to providing you a pre-built worksheet you can customize and send out to your teams, the worksheet also has embedded in it definitions of the nine roles and the columns on the data entry tab have comments with the definitions as well or people can click the column headers to jump to the tab with a definition (yes, there are tabs that define each of the nine roles).

Please also feel free to share any observations from your use of the Nine Innovation Roles in your organization.

For more information about the Nine Innovation Roles, please get some copies of my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire for your team or check out my previous article highlighting them.

Happy innovating!

Special Bonus

If you’ve read all the way to the bottom, then you deserve a free sample chapter from my new book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire. I hope you enjoy the sample chapter and consider purchasing the book as a way of supporting the future growth of this community.

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