Chuck The Geek.com

Innovation in IT

April 28th, 2008 by Chuck Sharp

On Friday I attended a symposium on innovation held by ASU’s WP Carey business school (my soon-to-be alma mater). Through several keynote speeches and panels, we were quickly exposed to several futuristic thinkers that are advancing IT and collaborative technologies. I hope to spell out some of these ideas in greater detail in the next few days, as they’re worthy of attention. Here is a quick run down of highlights (to me, anyway) from Bart Steiner’s talk.

What is Innovation?

Innovation means different things to different people and organizations. Minimally, innovation involves making new stuff and making older stuff new. However, a company is not innovating if it doesn’t reach the consumer: innovation requires value, and therefore a sale.

Required for innovation

• An innovation ecosystem involving a company, experts, and consumers. In other words, a company won’t likely create the greatest new products and services in a vacuum.
• Generation of lots and lots of ideas. This is just about the law of averages; On average, out of so many ideas, some are bound to be good. Therefore, the more ideas, the more good ideas.
• A process to nurture and develop the great ideas. Remember, ideas are worthless until they’re developed and monetized.

Steps to build an innovation platform

1. Define innovation for you - what does innovation mean for your company?
2. Force innovation discussion up, down, and across the organization - who needs to be talking about innovation?
3. Cross pollinate employee creativity - what groups should be sharing ideas?
4. Seek suppliers’ serendipitous creativity - what do your suppliers want you to know/change/do/create?
5. Embrace marketplace - Use an intermediary idea marketplace (see below).
6. Consummate consumer relationship - Make them part of your team, internalize all of their feedback.
7. Find a technology that enables the process.

An obvious question in this process is, why will 25 million innovative consumers in today’s marketplace and 20 million field experts help a company innovate? Not just for money, but for fun, recognition, and to fix their own stuff. It’s possible and desirable by all to get consumer to produce these ideas and feedback, even without compensation.

Tools for innovation

These tools are used to solicit ideas or develop them to maturity. The idea marketplace lets people buy ideas from others who are often competing against other, ala Innocentive, NineSigma, Yet2, the Global Ideas Bank, and Ideacrossing.com. Idea-maturing tools allow people (selective audience or public) to collaborate to refine and develop the idea to something useful. This could be something specific to software like Sourceforge, general social networking site like Ning, or company innovation forums like Dell’s Ideastorm or Proctor & Gamble’s Connect & Develop. Bulbstorm is Bart Steiner’s new company and product that provides a protective platform for developing innovations.

Innovation in the workplace

• Utilize social networks - connect your employees using forums, wiki’s, blogs, etc in order to connect.
• Make it fun. This process should not be boring, obligatory, etc. Make it easy, pleasant, pretty, productive, and interesting.
• Reward cross-functional collaboration. People who move out of their professional social circles are much more likely to produce innovations.
• Make it open to everyone. Everyone has great ideas and valuable perspectives, so utilize all of them.
• Present challenges and ideas. Allow for both spontaneous idea development as well as for problem/challenge solving processes.
• Allow users to discuss, vote, solve, and give feedback. This process requires many iterations of discussion and refinement.
• Incent (reward) participation with gift cards, recognition, bonuses, cookies?, prizes, etc.

Entry Filed under: Information Technology