August 2010 Archives

Collaborating with customers and other key stakeholders to co-create value is a surging trend and a hot topic at most companies.  It is also the theme of my forthcoming book - Collaboration and Co-Creation: New Platforms for Marketing and Innovation.  

Most readers may be familiar with the well-publicized of examples of co-creation, such as Frito Lay's creation of Super Bowl commercials, Dell's involvement with  its customer community, IdeaStorm, to shape product development and customer service strategy, and how Threadless collaborates with customers to create and produce its line of T-shirts.

But what about the non-business world - are these platforms just as relevant in co-creating value in fields like education, promoting green behaviors, and healthcare, as they are in co-creating advertisements and new products?  The answer is yes.  My recent HBR blog discusses how The Clinic of Innovation, at Oslo University Hospital, uses these platforms to nurture and treat innovative ideas.

IBM and its Innovation Jams technology has an extensive track record collaborating with not-for-profit organizations like World Urban Forum, NATO, and USAID on co-creation challenges involving urban poverty, international security, and promoting cooperation with the Muslim world through entrepreneurship and education.  The blog features an interview with Liam Cleaver, one of the principal architects of the Jams platform and its many applications.

Greetings Liam, do you want to kick off the interview by providing a brief primer on the Jams platform; how Jams are conceived and implemented.

Glad to.  An IBM Jam is an on-line collaborative event, often also referred to as crowdsourcing, involving the discussion and exchange of ideas around a specific topic or a set of topics.  The audience is invited to participate in a meaningful and constructive exchange of ideas, thoughts, and opinions.  This exchange takes place over a finite time period, usually a few days.  

We took the name "Jam" from the notion of a jam session. Jazz musicians who are passionate about their music and can sit and create something amazing even if they have never met before. This is the experience we look to create in an IBM Jam, the ability to connect people who might otherwise never meet, and have them share their passion for a topic, and build on each other's thoughts to create something remarkable. Like all events there is a backstage team helping to make connections and facilitating the exchange of ideas - trained facilitators, Jam Hosts, and experts in semantic data analytics technology from our IBM Research division, called COBRA.

What has been your overall experience with Jams? Positive, very positive, negative? Share a few key case studies to help us understand your answer.

Very positive, indeed!  We have run Jam events with participants from every walk of life. What has always impressed me is the ability of Jams to tap into people's natural desire to want to make a difference - make a meaningful contribution or have a positive impact on their place of work or where they live. A few examples:

• The World Urban Forum (WUF) was established by the United Nations to examine rapid urbanization and its impact on cities, economies and policies. Habitat Jam run in 2005 for the World Urban Forum was the largest brainstorming ever on urban sustainability, bringing together NGOs, politicians and academia, and slum dwellers whose lives were directly impacted by this body. Over 8,000 ideas were distilled to 70 core ideas - this core set were all presented at the WUF3 conference and adopted as its official platform.
• Eli Lilly's CEO, through VisionJam, engaged over half of their global population to identify practical ideas for how to realise their new strategy and vision resulting in a new framework for the company.
• More recently, the NATO supported SecurityJam to address 21st Century security threats and CovJam for the City of Coventry in the UK, were truly impressive in terms of the range of ideas generated and quality of interaction.

Liam, in your opinion, what are some key misconceptions and misgivings people have about Jams?

There are a few misgivings.

• First, I frequently hear that, 'this approach doesn't result in tangible outcomes, and it is simply a chat session and no different from how or why people use Facebook or Twitter.' 
• The other prevalent view is 'people will only share their ideas in an anonymous environment.' Jams are not anonymous by design. A sense of trust is created in the Jam seeing a person's name associated with their comments, and certainly adds to the level of constructive (if at times critical) debate. 

A typical Jam lasts 72-hours, with people signing on around their busy daily schedules for perhaps 30 minutes, or an hour at a time. They are encouraged to return by the quality of the discussion and by their own desire to push emerging ideas forward.  The audience knows, in advance, that the Jam sponsor is committed to act on the results and outcomes of the discussion, so they are willing to roll-up their sleeves and contribute.  Jams do have the potential to be very fulfilling, as they do lead to follow-up action.  But there is a risk as well, raising the audience's expectations with no plan for follow-though.

The biggest misconception people have is that Jams are automatic, spontaneous, and require little or no planning.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  There is nothing spontaneous and automatic about a Jam event.  Without all the investment of time and effort up-front, during, and after, a Jam would be a non-starter and have zero value.  The best Jams are those that have unwavering focus, and unquestioned commitment to follow-through and act on the recommendations.

What would be the best example of such a Jam, one that had unwavering focus and intent from the start, and which resulted in concrete, long-lasting outcomes?

Without a doubt, that would be IBM's InnovationJam in 2006. Before the Jam launched our Chairman, Sam Palmisano, committed $100 million in funding to ideas that utilized emerging technologies to solve existing business and societal challenges. Over 150,000 people from 104 countries participated during the 72-hour Jam generating over 40k posts that were narrowed down to 30 core ideas. The executive team selected 10 big ideas that represented first-of-a-kind new businesses within IBM; of which, over half represent IBM's corporate-wide Smarter Planet initiative launched in 2008.  So, it can safely be said, that a significant portion of IBM, namely the Smarter Planet initiatives, came into being as a result of the Jam. 

A change in Culture and Mindset is critical for collaborative innovation to take root and become reality in any company. Does IBM Jam regularly with employees to shape its own culture and mindset? 

IBM has been 'jamming' with it employees since 2001. In 2003, we used the Jam solution to reexamine the company's core values since their inception nearly 100 hundred years earlier. Through ValuesJam, IBMers came together to define the essence of the company. The result was a new set of core values - defined by IBMers for IBMers - that now shape everything we do and every choice we make on behalf of the company and our clients. Over 220,000 employees downloaded the "values manifesto" created as a result of the ValuesJam.

Thank you Liam for your time and views. I know you are bullish on Jams. What issues will challenge Jam experts like you over the next 3-5 years?

Yes, I expect to stay bullish on Jams, and yes, I expect to continue to be challenged.  Several things.

• First, I expect more companies to use Jams to engage their employees, customers, and other key stakeholders; in my opinion "jamming" with employees is still underutilized.
• Second, given the volume of data Jams generate, we need continued improvements in data and visual analytics to help make sense of the data in real-time and identify underlying themes, values, and sentiments.
• Third, why just English, why not jams in other languages as well?
• Lastly, everyday the connection between the PC and the Internet is weakening, with smart phones and other mobile devices capturing more users and accounting for more usage.  These devices will also need to be part of Jam events in the future

I can relate to Liam's responses. Thanks to him, I was able to get a firsthand understanding of the nature, power, and limitations of Jams, by participating in the USAID Jam event held earlier this year.  It was truly a valuable learning experience, one that greatly enhanced my appreciation for the Jams innovation platform.

Come October, Springer will launch my new book, Collaboration and Co-Creation: New Platforms for Marketing and Innovation.  In this blog post, I'd like to briefly introduce the book - what motivated it, its structure, and essence.  I'd also like to take this opportunity to recognize and celebrate my collaborators.

It's a rare day when some media personality or academic guru doesn't proclaim - this is not your father/grandfather's economy!  It isn't. The reason it isn't is because the ethos (defining characteristics) of today's world is different.  Several C's and a T; connectivity, creativity, collaboration, community, and technology, especially the Internet, best capture the ethos of the world we live, play, and work in.  At the center of this maelstrom lies a new and empowered customer that best exemplifies this ethos in motion.

Companies today are dealing with a new type of customer; one that is more educated, better connected, and infinitely more creative and resourceful than at any time in the past. Today's customers expect to be heard; they are unwilling to be mere consumers, passive and invisible at the end of a long value chain - instead they want to be collaborators and co-producers of the products and services they consume.  They don't want to merely watch TV reports on Haiti's earthquake, they also want to report on it and use their social media skills to mobilize aid.  They don't want to merely watch the Super Bowl game, they also want to win Frito Lay's "Crash the Super Bowl Ad Contest" by creating ads for Doritos.  They don't want to merely moan and groan about Dell's lousy customer service - been there, done that - they also want to shape Dell's customer service and product innovation priorities by participating in its IdeaStorm community.   

Consequently, customer collaboration and co-creation is a hot item on the strategic agenda of most companies.  They have been fired up by books like Wikinomics, Here Comes Everybody, Crowdsourcing, We-Think, etc., that applaud and celebrate the rise of the empowered customer.  They hear pundits urging them to rethink the way in which traditional firm-centric activities like marketing and innovation should be implemented to win the empowered customer's business.

But for most companies the key question is how?  There is little out there to help them migrate from applause to implementation.  What does a company do after it gets all excited and motivated about collaborating with customers?  How does it engage them in re-shaping its marketing and innovation efforts? A few market leaders, like Unilever, IBM, Hallmark, and Audi have figured it out.  But the majority of companies are still huddled at the starting line debating how best to implement collaborative innovation programs.

About the Book

Collaboration and Co-Creation helps bridge this gap.  Using a simple and easy-to-understand framework, Listen-Engage-Respond, and numerous case studies from around the world, the book helps readers shake hands with a core set of thinking and action tools for implementing collaborative innovation programs in their own companies.  It nudges readers to view collaborative innovation as a business process that can be systematically designed and implemented, not as some spontaneous, self-organizing outburst of periodic customer benevolence.  The book was written with a show, don't tell mindset.   Hence the emphasis on sharing, discussing, and guiding using a variety of business and non-business cases, examples, and stories, so as to make the content eminently readable and interesting.   

Collaboration and Co-creation is a compact eight-chapter book.    

• Chapters 1 and 2 set the stage.  Using case studies like the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, birth of mountain biking, open source software, and Hallmark, chapter 1 discusses the evolution and dissemination of collaborative innovation in contemporary businesses.  Chapter 2 presents the Listen-Engage-Respond framework and illustrates it with case studies involving the Phoenix Suns and Unilever's Marmite.

• Chapters 3 through 6 provide an elaboration of the Listen-Engage-Respond framework.  They discuss each of the legs of the framework, once again liberally supported with a large number of short (a few paragraphs) and regular (a few pages) case studies.  A few examples being - Barak Obama's election campaign, International Flavors and Fragrances, Nike, Audi, Blizzard Entertainment, Nokia, P&G, Frito Lay, NASA, Ellen Degeneres, and the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure.

• Chapters 7 and 8 aim to end the book on an emotional high.  Chapter 7 discusses the implications of becoming more open and collaborative on traditional firm-centric activities like marketing and innovation.  Supporting examples and case studies drawing on the experience of Unilever, Crayola, IBM, Sun, and Ubuntu are provided to help support the discussion.  Chapter 8 takes the reader on an eclectic journey beyond the business world.  Using examples ranging from the country of Denmark, to a clinic of innovation in Norway, to IBM's innovation jams, the chapter discusses how the Listen-Engage-Respond framework is just as effective and relevant in co-creating value in the fields of education, healthcare, economic growth, and global welfare, as in co-creating advertising based on UGC (user-generated content).

The book's Foreword is by Mr. Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever.  Leading business executives and thought leaders from the academic and consulting worlds, like Vijay Govindrajan, Nicolas Mirzayantz, Jacob Buur, Vince Barabba, John Hagel III, and Steve Howe, who had a chance to review the content before it went to print, have provided their insights and frank assessment of the book's framework and ability to foster customer-centric transformation.  We hope you will find it just as useful in leading customer-centric transformations in your own companies.

Collaborators

Writing a book is seldom a solo endeavor; it is always a team event.  Collaboration and Co-creation is no exception.  I would like to acknowledge and celebrate Deanna Lawrence and Gabriela Head's valuable contributions to researching the myriads of cases and examples that breathe life into the book's content and their participation in triggering and writing various chapter drafts.  

This collaboration has a very compelling underlying story that deserves to be shared.  Deanna lives in Michigan, Gabriela in Arizona, and I in Virginia.  I have known and worked with Deanna for several years, so working remotely with her was not a big deal.  But till today, one book and hundreds of calls later, I have yet to meet Gabriela.  And barring a two-hour meeting over a cup of coffee while in Arizona to attend a wedding, well after approximately 70% of the book was written, neither does Deanna have any previous history of working with Gabriela.  Needless to add, we are working hard to synchronize intent and calendars so we can all be in one place and toast the launch of the book in October.     

As the famous line in the classic short story - Face on the Wall - states, truth is not only stranger than fiction, but also greatly more interesting.  Yes, it is true, honest and productive work relationships can flourish, despite time and distance barriers.  They merely need a steady and constant infusion of trust and commitment.  Make no mistake, though, it is difficult, but infinitely rewarding.  I was not surprised at all therefore to learn that the latest "Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize" for the best article published in 2008-2009 was awarded by the editors of Sloan Management Review to the article  - How to Manage Virtual Teams.  Folks, if anyone is looking to do more research on this subject and needs first hand experiential data, please talk to us.  We will be happy to tell all!

In the coming weeks, I intend to feature interviews with companies and individuals who shared their stories with us and also provide more details on selected aspects of the book.  Stay tuned!