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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I originally posed this software design challenge to application developers in September 2008 based on an InfoWorld
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.
I saw the second picture in this article (of a dog washing machine in Japan) over my wife’s shoulder during a leisurely reading of the Sunday Seattle Times yesterday. I think it was in the Parade magazine, and as I started writing this article I found the same picture posted two years ago
Now, I can say with reasonable certainty that very few dog or cat owners really enjoy giving Fido or Princess a bath, and so the idea of a machine that you lead Fido or Princess into and shut the door and push a button to accomplish the job, sounds very appealing. It can be an incredibly messy operation fraught with danger and frustration (thus the rise of self-service dog washing places), but when you look at the first picture, is the emotional trauma of the experience something that dog or cat owners (or dogs/cats for that matter) could endure over the long term?
During the winter holiday shopping season in 2007 I was suspicious when a man at Costco asked if he could scan my Costco card while I was standing in line, thinking that he was going to try and sell me on their executive card. I was pleasantly surprised when he then scanned my items with a portable scanner/computer and gave me a slip of paper to alert the cashier that he had done so.
As a provider of innovation coaching services along with training and
The outcome of a back and forth of a dialog on Twitter with Scramray E. Pinkus generated a lovely quote worth sharing:
I don’t typically frequent fast food restaurant chains, but today I did, and I had a food innovation sighting for my trouble. I stopped by the local Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) and Taco Bell combination store and as I was picking up my crispy strips order I heard a guy order two Doritos Tacos.