Innovation and Customer Communities: Made For Each Other

Posted on February 18, 2013 by Gaurav Bhalla

Many elements contribute to making a company innovative and to making innovation programs successful. A few key elements being quality of customer insights, access to cutting edge technologies, alignment between innovation strategy and overall business strategy, and the big one—corporate culture.

Even though there is a rich tradition of incorporating the voice of the customer (VOC) in the innovation programs of a company—to make them valued and relevant—there is little discussion of the role and importance of customer communities; a contemporary way of hard-wiring the voice of the customer in the central nervous system of a company.

Which leads us to a critical question, “Is there a natural connection between innovation and customer communities? Do they feed off each other?” Read More…

PDMA’s PIM 2012 Co-Creation Lab: Implementing Co-Creation

Posted on November 17, 2012 by Gaurav Bhalla

The key theme of the Co-Creation Lab I conducted at the recently concluded PIM 2012, PDMA’s annual conference held in Orlando, was Implementing Co-Creation.

Applauding co-creation is easy, but implementing it often poses interesting challenges. Based on our formal/informal research, my co-presenter Aric Rindfleisch (who unfortunately caught the flu and couldn’t participate) and I have identified three main reasons that potentially make implementing co-creation challenging.

What: Effective implementation requires an understanding of the entire ecosystem of collaboration, not just a few parts; incomplete and/or ambiguous understanding of the roles, requirements, and interactions of the individual stakeholders in this ecosystem can lead to implementation stalling or getting derailed.

How: Underestimating the effort and co-ordination required to implement. We find this to be a serious problem. Data and our opinion suggest that there is a widespread belief that co-creation just happens, as a byproduct of crowds, their enthusiasm, and the cognitive surplus that they carry, and which they can’t dump anyplace else.

Outcomes: Overestimating value of co-creation outcomes. A little introspection, and a truckload of honesty won’t hurt here. How many great ideas have each one of us come up with in the last 24 hours, in the last week, in the last month? I routinely visit a lot of innovation challenge and co-creation sites to stay abreast and continue learning, and always come away feeling petrified and totally inadequate. Thank God my livelihood doesn’t depend on winning those challenges, I would be living sucking air and drinking rainwater. Our research based on an analysis of lots of co-creation data shows that active collaborators and co-creators on average have ONE good idea, no more.

Using a large number of examples — British Airways, Dell, Electrolux, The Clinic of Innovation at Oslo University Hospital, MasterCard, Pringles, and Mountain Dew’s DEWmocracy, we offered the attendees a framework — which we called Co-Creation GPS, to help companies assess their readiness to implement co-creation — and several suggestions for effective implementation of co-creation in their organizations.

While it is impossible to compress a whole morning in 800 words or less, a few key takeaways are worth emphasizing.

First, believe in co-creation before launching into implementation. Companies that have genuine respect for their customers and their innovation-related contributions are likely to do much better than those that are not sure what their customers have to offer, or how they can help co-drive their innovation programs. Dell and Mountain Dew would be excellent examples here.

Second, approach implementation with an investment mindset, or don’t approach it at all. Implementing co-creation is effortful and requires both an organization and resources. In the absence of these investments, co-creation programs are likely to flop. British Airways has invested in creating a Future Lab, Oslo University Hospital in a Clinic of Innovation.

Third, the single most important investment a company can make is investing in developing ecosystems of collaboration, especially communities — of customers, employees, dealers, and other relevant stakeholders. In addition to the examples provided above, companies like Starbucks, Boeing, Whirlpool, Intuit, and Electrolux provide excellent examples of investments in communities.

Fourth, remember the rule of ONE: one good idea on average. Keeping that in mind, look for collaborators far and wide, not just among current customers, collaborate with non-customers as well, with employees, and those who are not related to your category, but are connected to it. Collaborate with experts. Companies like Pitney Bowes, MasterCard, International Flavors & Fragrances all provide excellent examples of collaborating with small and medium-sized businesses, employees, and flavor/fragrance experts.

Lastly, give a little to get a lot. Share the outcomes of your collaboration and co-creation programs with your collaborators. Recognition matters, rewards matter, money matters! Frito-Lay’s Doritos brand has been the darling of the Super Bowl ads for several years. In six previous contests, the company has distributed $5 million in prize money and won the prestigious No. 1 USA TODAY Ad Meter ranking three times.

For its seventh edition, the Doritos brand is going even bigger. In a DTFW (direct-to-fans-webcast), the company announced its boldest and grandest prize to date — an opportunity to work with famed Hollywood producer Michael Bay on the next installment of the “Transformers” movie franchise, plus a shot at a $1 million bonus.

Worth it, you ask? I am sure Frito-Lay has a large number of ROI experts. I am also sure that they have numbers to prove how both the fans and Frito-Lay/Doritos are benefiting from “Crash the Super Bowl” contest (video below). Not bad for a program that started seven-plus years ago with literally a fistful of dollars and a handful of entrants.

Moral of the story: Co-creation can significantly boost the outcomes of your innovation programs. But like the old adage reminds us — GIGO (“garbage in, garbage out”) — not before you and your company have put some real resources and organization into it.

Innovation’s Primary Fuel and Higher Purpose

Posted on November 6, 2012 by Gaurav Bhalla

run Launching innovation is easy; sustaining it is difficult.

What is innovation’s primary fuel? Does it have a higher purpose?

Interesting questions, but I was not on a quest to answer them, I was not even meditating on the questions. I was merely watching a biennial ritual on TV — the Europeans messing up the Americans in golf.

A little context for all you non-golfers out there.

Every two years, courtesy of the Ryder Cup tournament, America goes into a deep funk, and a bunch of Europeans go totally punch-drunk on Guinness and champagne. The drama is high-voltage, the script bizarrely predictable. The star-studded American team suddenly turns pedestrian, heads south, the Europeans discover their mojo, and more, and race to victory. The 2012 version played in Medinah was no exception — U.S. slumped, EU soared in an amazing come-from-behind victory.

The commentators, as usual, were tongue-tied. Except Johnny Miller, he never runs out of things to say. One astute comment though caught my ear. It was an explanation for why the Europeans won. According to the commentator, I forget who it was, the Europeans won because they exhibited greater sustained passion, and because they were motivated by a higher purpose; the higher purpose being winning the cup for Seve Ballestoros, the iconic Spaniard, more a Matador than a golfer, symbol of European Golf, a principal architect of European Ryder cup competitiveness first, domination later.

Passion and higher purpose — I had tuned off the golf, and tuned in innovation. It struck me that the two carry significant meaning for innovation as well.

Several companies launch their innovation programs with a great deal of enthusiasm and energy. But then they hit a wall, the momentum stalls, and innovation starts sputtering. It’s not lack of people and resources alone, those do matter, but my research and consulting experience point to a more important reason.

Companies that run out of gas invariably have embraced the symbolism of innovation — it’s what you do to be perceived as hip, or to signify how progressive you are to your stakeholders, but they have not imbibed its spirit. Their passion for innovation is skin-deep, like the athlete who aspires to win, but lacks the commitment to practice.

Companies that are able to sustain forward innovation movement are able to do so mainly because a few key people in the company, with the requisite power, of course, genuinely believe that innovation needs to be the company’s #1 priority, not because the experts are saying it, but because they are absolutely and totally convinced that if they don’t they will lose customers and jeopardize their future growth.

It’s the difference between weekly piety expressed on a particular day of the week, Tuesdays, Fridays, Sundays (depending on one’s religious persuasion) and living a spiritual life day in and day out, because you are convinced that all other alternatives are intrinsically inferior.

What about higher purpose? Does innovation have a higher purpose? Should it have a higher purpose? Most certainly, it does — it should.

Despite all the talk of concerning customer-centricity, market-focused, how important customers are to the long-term health of a business, etc., most companies continue to be inwardly focused. Technology still provides the major impetus for new product development (NPD) and innovation. The road to the market very often still begins with new cool features.

OK, but what about the customer? Is the customer buying? There is a brilliant article/case study, titled “The Quality Improvement Customers Didn’t Want!”

Innovation has a higher purpose. It is serving the customer. Innovation should only have one goal — the creation of customer value. In the final outcome, only the customer decides if something is valuable or not, not the factory (I should not be heard as saying the customer can tell you exactly what they want in the future; I have addressed this issue in my previous posts). Failure to serve this higher purpose leads to disillusionment, dissatisfaction with the outcome of innovation programs, and ultimately to innovation stall.

All customer value is subject to decay, because of emergence of new alternatives; competition, technologies, change in beliefs and values (smoking, fatty foods, etc.). The only sensible thing to do, knowing that even if you are king of the hill today, you may not be tomorrow, is to make continuous customer value creation your Holy Grail.

Passion for Innovation + Making Innovation Serve a Higher Purpose = Winning Customers’ Hearts. Inevitably, their wallets will follow.

The Shapley Value, Nobel Prize in Economics, and Collaboration

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Gaurav Bhalla

Lloyd S. Shapley, professor emeritus of economics and mathematics at UCLA, has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, along with Harvard University economist Alvin E. Roth. (Photo courtesy of UC Irvine.)

I have to be honest with you: The Nobel Prize committee has not been riding high on my favorite list ever since they awarded the Peace Prize to the EU. What a myopic definition of peace. It’s not just the absence of war — what about social peace and economic peace? Besides, I still haven’t forgiven them for not having awarded the prize to Mahatma Gandhi.

So, when I read a few mornings ago that the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, aka the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, had been awarded to Stanford’s Al Roth and UCLA’s Lloyd S. Shapley I didn’t know what to make of it — not because I thought that the Committee had goofed, but because I knew nothing about their work.

Ignorance had to be banished. Time for research and reading. What I discovered was all very good stuff — market design and game theory, with applications in education and medicine. Knowledge and the application of knowledge. Exquisite! And in the process, I discovered a very interesting link between the work of one of the prize winners and collaboration. Yes, you heard me right — collaboration. No, it’s not a Freudian slip, and no, I am not promoting my own agenda.

Prof. Shapley’s mathematical and economic achievements are many and numerous to be recounted and recognized in one blog post. However, he is best known for the concept named after him, the “Shapley Value.” At its core, the Shapley Value focuses on the cumulative benefits reaped by all participants in games in which participants cooperate rather than compete.

OK, I admit that “cooperate” and “collaborate” are not the same. But cut me a little slack, will you? Let’s for a moment transcend the semantics and focus on the underlying dynamics: intellectual, personal, and social.

We are all products of our conditioning. From a very young age we are brought up with a passion for competition. We worship winners; we loathe losers. It’s drilled into us that winning is not everything — it’s the only thing. But very rarely are we brought up to respect and value collaboration, let alone recognize it and reward it. For some inexplicable reason, a desire to collaborate and cooperate is seen as a sign of weakness.

But that’s so inconsistent with the nature of the times we live in. In today’s complex, interconnected, information-rich, and data-saturated world, collaboration is not only important, it is essential, and, in some cases, downright indispensable. Viewing collaboration as a sign of weakness can, in many cases, actually prove detrimental to sustainable, long-term growth. Imagine trying to solve some of the world’s most vexing problems — urban poverty, clean transportation, green behaviors, education, social innovation — without collaboration.

A competitive mindset has definite bounds, it can only get us so far and no further. So, it’s very refreshing and extremely pleasing to find the importance and value (pun intended) of collaboration being recognized and rewarded — the Shapley Value — albeit indirectly. Adopting a new mindset that mixes and matches collaboration and competition sensibly and in an enlightened way can be exciting and fun. We owe it to ourselves to give it a try.

I, for one, look to be inspired by the Nobel Prize awarded to Prof. Shapley and by his most important idea, the Shapley Value. I hope you will too. Bring your friends, your family, your community, your town, your country.

Before we know it, the world will be here!

Three Steps Forward: Future Scenarios + Communities + Predictive Analytics for Fueling Innovation

Posted on October 11, 2012 by Gaurav Bhalla

Marketing Research (MR) has been under fire for several years now. It has been blamed, accused, even lynched for a variety of ills, not all of its own making. Part of the problem lies with our expectations and part with how we use the tools available to us.

An illustration. One of the most common criticisms levied against MR by Innovation and New Product Development (NPD) professionals is that consumers/customers are unable to articulate their future needs and preferences. The critics quote Ford (“I would never have built an automobile, just given them a faster horse”), and cite Apple (Apple never did any MR).

For the moment, let’s leave geniuses aside and focus on the criticism, which has some truth to it but also has one very strong built-in assumption. It assumes a question-and-answer model of generating customer insight; the researcher asks the question, the customer answers. No wonder the critics feel vindicated. Because if all of us were so adept at seeing and predicting the future, the world would be a very different place — either anti-depressants would become extinct, or their sales would skyrocket!

Jokes aside, what if there was a different way of generating these insights, an alternative way of fueling innovation; a way that did not devalue customer input and overvalue firm/executive intuition? (For a more detailed discussion on the value of beginning with the customer in driving innovation, please read my previous post.)

What if there was a way that would lead us to a destination other than a faster horse? It was this motivation that has led me to dig deeper, to ask tougher questions, rather than accept the status quo:

What if, given a company’s strategic intent and direction, we could build an array of relevant and sensible futures with the greatest potential for growth? Guess what, it can be done. Contrary to popular belief, we live in a world of inevitable surprises, not one that is totally uncertain. Meaning, we can foretell with a great deal of confidence the happening of outcomes and events in the future, because that’s where we have been headed for so many years; granted that the actual velocity and timing of events may be uncertain.
What if there was a way we could then simulate these futures and place customers in these hypothetical environments? Again, it can be and has been done. Think tanks, scenario-planning professionals have been doing this for a long time. In marketing, thought leaders like Profs. John Hauser and Glen Urban of MIT have pioneered techniques labeled Information Acceleration (IA) to situate customers in alternate future contexts.
What if there was a way to listen to and engage with a group of finite individuals over time, have real-time conversations with them, iterate ideas, develop value propositions, and then assess the appeal of these potential offerings? Again, it can be done. Communities of category users, customers, and potential customers offer an excellent platform for having dynamic real-time conversations with the market place to generate insights and drive co-creation and collaborative innovation.
What if there was a way to model customers preferences in alternative futures, to show how they morph and evolve, and why they do so? Again, it can be done. Predictive analytics exist that combine rational and emotional drivers of choice, which in turn can help companies develop better value propositions.

Clearly, there is an alternative. We can keep customers front and center to shape insights, NPD, and innovation programs without risking asking simple questions and getting simple (and not useful) answers.

Since collaboration and co-creation is my gig, I joined hands with Passenger, the best-in-class full-service company for online customer communities, and The Modellers, the best-in-class information acceleration and predictive analytics company, to co-create Three Steps Forward, a powerful new suite of consulting and research services that leverage customer communities to help companies jumpstart and shape their innovation and NPD programs.

The DNA of Three Steps Forward is presented in the figure below.

3SF

If your company is wrestling with how to generate actionable customer-centric intelligence to shape and fuel your company’s NPD and innovation programs, then Three Steps Forward is for you. It has been designed to overcome the limitations of traditional MR. Its dynamics:

developing alternative future scenarios
situating a community of customers in these concrete future contexts, and
modeling both the rational and emotional aspects of customer choice to develop future customer value propositions,

are unmatched in scope, richness, and relevance.

Please contact us for a more detailed discussion. We will be happy to demonstrate how Three Steps Forward can benefit your company’s NPD and innovation programs.

The Importance of Customer Value in Shaping Innovation Investments

Posted on October 5, 2012 by Gaurav Bhalla

Handshake There appears to be an unwritten rule that celebrity and mythology are intertwined. Interestingly, this mythology gets thicker as the status and power of the celebrity increase. This has several unfortunate consequences, the most severe being that, over time, the dominant circulating myths convey a reality that never even happened.

The collateral damage is significant. Why? Because what really occurred loses its ability to educate, inform, and inspire. All that remains is flatulent fodder for café conversations.

Stories of Apple and Steve Job’s approach to product innovation — fondness for marketing research and importance placed on customer needs (or lack of it, to be more accurate) — fall into this category.

In the past 24 months, I have conducted executive education programs in several different parts of the world — Asia, Europe, and North America. As I am biased towards action learning, I always lace my materials with tons of real-life examples and workshops.

In selecting these examples and mini case studies, I try very hard to stay away from the usual suspects — Apple, Nike, Starbucks, etc. My reason — examples from these companies have been overplayed to such an extent that they have lost their ability to educate and inform. (To learn more, please read my previous post where I recommend that conference organizers declare a moratorium on these companies and force presenters to discuss other examples, so that new learning can take place.)

But no mater how hard I try, it is very difficult for me to totally escape a discussion involving Apple. No matter which part of the world I am in, seminar participants will invariably bring up Apple and Steve Jobs. And since the focus of my seminars is rethinking marketing and rethinking innovation — customer centricity, customer experience, collaborative innovation, collaboration and co-creation — one of the most common objections I encounter is, “but Apple and Steve Jobs don’t talk to customers before launching new products, they don’t do any marketing research, they rely on their own genius, etc.”

Myth or reality? Invariably, participants respond emphatically – reality!

While statements referencing Apple’s disdain for formal/traditional marketing research are well-documented, interpreting that as, or equating it to disregard for the customer, customer needs, and customer experience in shaping innovation strategies is both dangerous and inaccurate. Value is always determined by the customer, never by a technician, no matter how brilliant the technician.

Having been active in the executive education field since 1985, I know better than to argue with participants, especially when they are deeply attached to their POV.

So, I decided to take the road less traveled – go on an archeological dig. To find something, anything, that would show Steve Jobs acknowledging how much he values the customer, customer experience, and customer needs in influencing his company’s innovation decisions and his own thinking. And lo and behold, I found it, for as Dumbledore likes to remind Harry – help is always given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it (perhaps I just lucked out).

It’s a short video, and I sincerely hope you saw it. I hope you heard Steve Jobs himself asserting, strongly, that the starting point should be the customer, and not the technology. That one shouldn’t work from the technology to the market place, but backward, from customer experience to technology. The latter, no matter how powerful and revolutionary, is always just a means to an end, never the end. Or as another great, Ted Levitt, author of the HBR classic, “Marketing Myopia,” likes to remind us – customers don’t buy ¼” drills, they buy ¼” holes.

Professionals involved with designing and implementing innovation programs will be well advised to think of what ¼” holes they want to drill first, and then work backwards to the drill. Exactly as Steve Jobs advises in his 1997 video.

To wrap up, nothing wrong with myths, they are good to fire up the gut. But let’s make sure we don’t distort reality to such an extent that we lose touch with the essential reality motivating the myth. In the final analysis, customer handshakes are not crafted in labs or on laptops, but in the real world of customers’ lives where their hearts, minds, and wallets interact in interesting, but inevitably predictable ways. If they can create value for themselves with what you have to offer, rest assured they will shake hands with your company, and its offering.

Listening to the “Birth of the Global Mind”

Posted on October 2, 2012 by David Grebow

Wikipedia defines synchronicity as “the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance, yet are experienced as occurring together in a meaningful manner. The concept of synchronicity was first described in this terminology by Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychologist, in the 1920s.”

It was the only way I could describe the last few days. Starting with one of the most brilliant presentations I have ever seen by Tim O’Reilly on the “Birth of the Global Mind,” I found myself reporting on the Social Good Summit. The event was a three-day conference, held on September 22-24 during the United Nations week, where big ideas met new media to create innovative solutions.

In a very real way, the conference gave rise to a whole new way of defining the UN in the Digital Age, but that’s another post. This year, the Social Good Summit brought together an amazing and diverse group of global thought leaders to discuss how innovative thinking and technology can help solve the greatest global challenges.

The Big Question is: How can we unlock the potential of new media and technology to make the world a better place, and then translate that potential into action?

The stated goals of this year’s summit were:

Bringing together a new dynamic community of leaders (and followers) — technologists, innovators, social entrepreneurs, bloggers, and more.
Raising awareness for the global challenges to be addressed by the General Assembly during UN Week.
Discovering, encouraging, and showcasing new and innovative solutions to those global challenges.
Igniting a conversation between a live audience and a worldwide audience via Livestream.
Connecting leaders already working in the social good space with technologists and other leaders who can collaborate and share best practices.
Creating a sustainable thought-leadership forum that sparks important discussion and inspires new solutions.

According to one of the key sponsors, Zaw Thet, Founder and Executive Chairman, Palindrome Advisors, and member of UN Foundation’s Global Entrepreneurs Council:

[T]he United Nations Foundation unveiled the Global Good Challenge… The Foundation’s largest and most ambitious digital initiative to date, the Global Good Challenge rewards participants with unique prizes for ‘donating their voices’ by taking action and engaging their online networks to support the work of the United Nations. [...]

Those who take the Challenge will raise awareness and take action to help the United Nations prevent malaria with Nothing But Nets, empower girls with Girl Up, and protect children from preventable diseases with Shot@Life. Now through mid-November, global citizens can sign up for the Global Good Challenge at unf.org/good or www.facebook.com/unitednationsfoundation, and join the conversation on Twitter: #GlobalGood and @unfggc.

Synergy. Tim O’Reilly talked about the global mind, a planet united by technology that for the first time in history can work as one on the problems faced by all of us. And the Social Good Summit was all about how we can use technology to make it happen.

The “Birth of a Global Mind” is a long presentation, and I’ll just point to it here and recommend you watch it.

You can also follow the progress of the ideas that were hatched at the summit. This year’s Social Good Summit was the most engaging one yet as people from around the world, in both the developed and the developing countries, from Beijing and Nairobi and all points in between, united in person and online to participate in The Global Conversation.

The summit centered around the world’s largest conversation on how technology can grow communities and improve life for all of us as we move toward being a networked society, aka global mind. It was just the beginning of the global conversation about collaboration and innovation at the intersection of a global technology.

I just wish I knew where to send the card congratulating the Earth on the birth of the global mind.

Source: “Tim O’Reilly: Birth of the Global Mind,” FORA.tv, 09/05/12
Source: “What to Expect from the 2012 Social Good Summit,” YouTube, 09/06/12
Source: “The Global Good Challenge — Engaging New Networks of Supporters on Global Issues,” The Huffington Post, 09/25/12

Only Collaboration Can Save Our Species

Posted on September 28, 2012 by David Grebow

Let me start with my premise. It’s bold enough to warrant an opening salvo, a shot across your Homo sapiens brow.

Modern human beings are still evolving. And our evolution will depend on that relatively recent part of our brain that enables us to collaborate. We are now in charge of our evolution. Our evolution as a species depends on how well we learn to collaborate.

Human evolution. We know that we as a species — genus homo — began our evolutionary trek around 2.3 million years ago as Homo habilis. That makes us a relatively young species. Looking back at our family tree, we morphed through the following notable anatomical changes:

Homo habilis
Homo heidelbergensis
Homo neanderthalensis
Homo rhodesiensis
Homo rudolfensis
Homo sapiens idaltu
Homo sapiens (That’s us.)

The evolution of the human brain and our intelligence — called “encephalization” — has been driven by our increasing need to solve social problems. As we moved from the small group of hunters to the larger tribe of gatherers, and then into the even bigger cooperative of farming communities, human society became more complex. More complexity meant there were more social problems to solve, and more social problems to solve meant more opportunities to collaborate.

In an earlier post, I wrote the following:

What amazing function did the brain need to perform to justify a complete redesign in a mere 200,000 years? What was so important to our survival as a species that we underwent a total overhaul that doubled the size of our brain?

The answer is fascinating: imagination. The brain became a powerful ‘experience simulator.’ It allowed us to imagine what something would be like before we tried it.

As I was listening to Dan Gilbert and his TED presentation, I realized that collaboration is one of the main reasons we developed imagination and use it to do more collaboration. We moved from imagining, ‘How big is the universe?’ to imagining, ‘How do we work together to build a spaceship to get to the moon?’

So, collaboration seems to be one of the main reasons we developed imagination. In other words, we became Homo Sapiens because we had a better brain that could imagine how to collaborate, and because we could imagine how to collaborate we became better Homo Sapiens.

Back to my opening statement: We are now in charge of our evolution. Our evolution as a species depends on how well we learn to collaborate as a species. Collaboration has become our number one survival skill. If we can learn to better collaborate as a species we will not only survive, we will thrive. If not, we go the way of the Raphus cucullatus, aka the Dodo bird.

Source: ”The surprising science of happiness,” TED presentation by Dan Gilbert, Feb. 2004
Images of human craniums and Dodo are from Wikipedia.

When Minds Collide: New Insights From Thought Leaders

Posted on September 27, 2012 by David Grebow

when our worlds collide

Fifty years ago, though leadership was a relatively slow process, enabled by conferences, papers, books, and other presentations. Then word of mouth took over and the leading thoughts of the day were slowly passed from mind to mind. Thought leaders had time to think, reflect, and refine their thinking.

Today, thought leadership moves at the speed of digital light and thought leaders need to constantly be evolving and rethinking to stay in a leadership position. Two of the best are Rajul Garg and Gaurav Bhalla.

Gaurav is one of the world’s preeminent thinkers, presenters, and writers about innovation, specifically “collaborative innovation,” which he defines as “an investment in providing incremental value to your customers, done in partnership with those customers to offer them increased value.”

Rajul and Gaurav were recently at the same conference where Gaurav was speaking about disaster management, politics, and governance. When thought leaders merge ideas — or there is “collaborative innovation,” as Gaurav might say — the results are always fascinating. Or, as Rajul says:

Sustained innovation is the best chance you have at sustained growth, and collaboration is the best way to sustain innovation.

Rajul is a leading thinker and writer about leadership and decision-making. Here are a few of his thoughts as a result of the conference, a confluence of the best thinking on leadership and collaboration:

Picking a problem that makes the world a better place provides an opportunity for you to collaborate far and wide to drive innovation. In that way, those are the problems that matter and you might have a higher chance of solving those.
Smaller collaborative experiments (in the programming world, this has resulted in the agile approach) with an evolutionary pattern have a much higher chance of success than large central planning driven approaches. Find a way to experiment!

In the past, it was an infrequent and often chance encounter that brought leading thinkers of the day together, or the long and invariably spirited conversations were delivered by hand. Those meetings are often detailed in history books about the collaborative innovation of ideas between great minds. These days, the melding of minds usually just happens, as it has occurred between Gaurav and Rajul, and the results — the collaborative innovation — benefit us all at the speed of digital light.

Source: “Leadership: Collaborative Innovation,” Sunstone Business Review, 09/04/12

The Tools for Innovation and Co-Creation

Posted on September 26, 2012 by David Grebow

The most powerful applications of social technologies in the global economy are largely untapped. By fully implementing social technologies, companies have an opportunity to raise the productivity of interaction workers — high-skill knowledge workers, including managers and professionals — by 20 to 25 percent. [McKinsey Global Institute, July 2012.]

We recently reported on the general outlines of this recent McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) study and now would like to fill in some of the most important details about knowledge workers and collaboration.

When it comes to collaboration, companies utilize a mix of tools and technologies. There are many large companies, such as IBM and SAP, that produce innovations to existing products by collaborating outside the company with customers, partners, and experts as well as people across the company.

The question is, what tools and resources do engineers and other innovation workers use to promote collaboration and knowledge-sharing, and accelerate product development?

The tools vary by industry and by task, and include an array of traditional internal repositories and systems, external content sources, and a number of new social technologies that enable greater collaboration and new forms of content creation, sharing, and consumption.

The report from McKinsey Global Institute indicates that:

[...] knowledge workers spend 28 hours each week writing emails, searching for information, and collaborating internally. Per MGI, Web 2.0 technologies — such as social networks, ratings and reviews, wikis, discussion forums and crowd-sourcing, among others — could represent a 20-25 percent improvement in knowledge worker productivity. With internal knowledge and external information more readily available via social media — a typical information worker could reduce information searching time by as much as 35 percent, returning over 6 percent of an innovation or knowledge worker’s workweek to other tasks.

MGI estimates that two-thirds of the value creation opportunity afforded by social media technologies comes from an organization’s ability to better communicate within and across the enterprise.

MGI also estimates that in using social technologies to gather customer feedback and gain customer insights, improve internal and external collaboration, and enable the co-creation of products, advanced manufacturing companies can capture value equal to 12%-15% of the costs.

Other findings of the study include the following:

Just 3% of companies are “fully networked” and using social media to interact with customers, partners, and employees.
In the U.S., only 5% of all communications and content takes place on social networks.
Companies that seek consumer input to drive product development have an opportunity to generate consumer insights and market intelligence via social media.
Social technologies could add an estimated $170-200 billion in value annually for advanced manufacturing industries.

Here is an infographic from the study:

What social media tools and technologies does your team use to collaboratively solve problems? We would really like to know, so please add your thoughts to the comments.

Source: “The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies,” MGI, July 2012
Source: “Collaborating Across Geographies to Foster New Ideas, Innovation,” Goldfire Blog, 06/13/12
Image by FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

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