Things which don’t exist in a lab

Just think about it, by the time you finish having your coffee, at least 10 new research papers would have been completed, by somebody somewhere in this world. Each would have taken their authors anywhere between 3-12 months. Some of this research, probably, addressing the very problem your company is dealing with.

Unlike the goods which get manufactured, a research item, many a time, does not have a predefined audience or an intended buyer. Being a product of academicians or sometimes just personal passion, there may not be any plan or effort to commercialize it, hence obviously it may not show up in a marketplace.

The story is the same for ideas, innovations, work-arounds or solutions, which constantly get created round the clock. The environmental conditions, passion or the necessities, under which these happen is impossible to replicate in any organised lab. In fact, some of these factors, can never exist in a lab.

This is the space where innovation intermediaries and technologies like semantic and business intelligence operate. It is possible today to monitor conversations about your interests in different parts of the world and reach out to someone who could have the solutions that your company is searching for. It is possible today to reach out, to people across continents or even in your own neighborhood, yet unknown, using the services of intermediaries.

‘Innovation’ is fast turning away from an ego centric mindset, where it must come from within a company, to just another on demand plug in, which empowers the real goals of the organization.

In turn, the in-house labs are becoming more versatile, busy, and are churning out innovation faster with the help of collaborative innovation.

Speed of innovation is the need of the hour, in this fiercely competitive world.

Innovative approach to attract niche talent

The deeper we dig, more ways to leverage collaborative innovation surface.

Companies in search of niche talent all over the world face hurdles in two folds – a) how to reach out to the right forum where the required niche talent frequent and b) how to screen and shortlist.


Here are some of the challenges which are frequently encountered and a possible way out.

Companies like Google have been organizing competitions to lure the right candidates. These competitions provide candidates the flavor of what the company expects and thus attract only the candidates who are genuinely interested. After all one won’t attempt to solve a complex mathematical problem unless she has a personal interest in the subject.

ideaken, offers a SaaS platform for companies to host such recruitment competitions. Companies can define a competition challenge, define an appropriate reward and open it to the entire world. The right reward creates the right pull for the candidates to showcase their skills. Even if you do not end up hiring the winning candidate, you create an impression about your brand and organization culture.

Once the potential candidates put in their solutions, a team of reviewers can screen the solutions, and shortlist the right fitment of candidates. The companies can subsequently take the process forward with these candidates offline.

Usage of ideaken platform for running a competitive requirement campaigns for niche skill provides certain distinct advantages 

a) Smart Short listing - No longer shortlist the candidate just because they have certain keyword in their resume.  

b) Keep the branding - You can hire the platform and brand with your logo and content.  

c) Web Based - everything being web based allows companies to post challenges and recruit people from all over.  

d) Central but not co-located Review Team – as the platform is web based, all the solutions can be reviewed by one review team which effectively brings uniformity to the entire process  

e) Schedule based – since the challenge will follow a certain schedule, the whole process becomes much more streamlined and predictable  

f) Real time dashboard – at any time, you know how many candidates are solving your challenge. Meaning you have a fair idea of the response and may want to promote the challenge in other places  

g) Rewarding the top solution – allows to build brand equity within the community by sending the right message about the innovative culture in the enterprise  

h) Ability to run multiple challenges - platform allows companies to run multiple challenges at the same time.

If you want to move away from the clutter of job portals and resume sourcing consultants and want to directly be in touch with your future employees. If you want to explore a new and innovative way to hiring then, you need to engage and start collaborating with your future employees. ideaken, collaborative innovation platform can help you take your first step towards this innovative hiring.

If you would like to evaluate how this concept could be utilized for your enterprise, please send us a mail at contact@ideaken.com for your competition hosting by ideaken.

Enterprise FAQs on collaborative innovation

Enterprises long ago realized that unless ‘Quality’ is part of every employee at work, on the ground and not in the books, just having a focus group for ‘Quality’ is a waste.

The pageant has reached focus group for ‘Innovation’. If you want to be an innovative company, you better have everybody who can innovate innovating for you, and there better be an established way for doing so. Though there are no arguments on why the leaders or the employees want collaborative innovation, there are few frequently asked questions? We present three of them here.

Would members of innovation focus group of an enterprise be ok with losing some control?
No and then Yes! No because it’s but natural to resist change. However the same team will find themselves benefiting from this change. When they have access to more raw ideas, more diverse solutions, access to more talent, the focus group will realise that they have more time to supervise and align the innovation to the business objectives. The change will allow the focus group to work on implementing the innovation in a manner that benefits the organization, in turn improving the productivity of innovation group.

How can I pick the right solution from all the noise?
Collaborative innovation is all about getting lots of solutions, good ones, bad ones, sometimes even pure trash, but this is part of the deal and needs to be dealt with. Here is how. a) Select the right solver base, even if you have selected all employees or whole world, promote your challenge in a right forum. b) Describe the challenge and be clear on what you want, explicitly state must meet and good if met expectations c) Distribute the task of solution reviews, let there be crowd sourcing even in the evaluation phase.

How can I, as a solver, be sure that my ideas will not be used without paying for it?
There is some possibility of one misusing the spirit of collaborative innovation and not paying for what they use. However there are ways to avoid it, here is how ideaken makes sure this misuse does not happen. a) ideaken makes serious effort to know who is posting the challenge b) innovation seeker accepts terms and conditions where they agree to allow audit on request. c) ideaken encourages enterprise usage of the platform, that means the challenge submission is always from a credible source. d) The entire transaction happens online, so there is an audit trail of everything which is said and shared.

Overall the benefits of collaborative innovation surpasses the challenges it throws at us. And that is one of the reasons why collaborative innovation, open innovation, co-creation is topping the list of innovation agenda of every leader in the enterprise.

Why won’t Joe solve my problem?

You might assign the problem to someone, but chances of you asking Joe is real slim.

You may have estimated the effort this solution might require, some of that already used up, but you may not know when you will get a solution or if you will get a solution.  You have a bad problem in hand, but worse is Joe who has a solution for your problem won’t solve it for you.

Here is why - Joe works for a different division!  Joe won’t solve it for you because you won’t ask him, and sure enough Joe won’t get to know that you have such a problem.

Is it possible to find how much an elastic band will stretch without actually stretching it?  Probably yes, a good guess could get you close enough.

Is it possible to find out by how much harder an employee can work for you? May be yes, at least you would know the limitations & boundaries.

But is it possible to find out what your people can solve for you in addition to the work you pay them for? Bit tough, may be you can’t.

In an attempt to leverage this untapped potential - enterprises are now creating a two way specialized pipe within the enterprise, for example a pipe for collaborative innovation. You broadcast your problem to all including Joe via this pipe. All, including Joe tune into this pipe for the challenges the enterprise is seeking solutions for.

Joe is happy to share the solution, provided someone asks for it, a reward of fully paid two nights vacation only makes him happier! 

So is this the end of all innovation challenges enterprise face? maybe not. But if Joe exists somewhere out there, then you will surely not miss out on Joe’s solution.

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ideaken enables enterprises when they need to collaborate to innovate, with employees, customers, research vendors, academia or with global pool of talent.

Little book of collaborative innovation by ideaken on display at Odyssey outlet

Putting the theory of collaborative innovation to practice - ideaken.com is live!

We call it a beginning of  how power of social media shifting from instant gratification to creating a sustainable value.

ideaken team is excited and proud to announce the launch of a platform for collaborative innovation.

We believe our platform offers many firsts on how software as a service (SaaS) is getting rolled out to the world. We also believe that we offer the best possible platform to date which facilitates innovation via collaboration. And we are committed to keep it that way.

Check out collaborative innovation concept overview and how the platform works

Welcome onboard!

On what my obstacles feed?

To increase the speed, I need more power; more power is at the expense of more weight, which in turn decreases the speed. Be it an automobile or an enterprise, knowing - on what your obstacles feed - helps. Following questions; when answered, will find some of yours.

Culture / Mindset

1) Do you associate part of your employee satisfaction to the innovative culture?
2) Does your enterprise enforce people to think only in terms of their roles?
3) Are you stuck with the thought that innovation is responsibility of HQs?
4) Is conviction that you are an innovative enterprise holding you back from doing more?
5) Is the world passing by? Are you too internally focused?

ROI / Priorities

6) Are your stakeholders’ & investors’ short term focus backed by solid reasoning?
7) Is your customer-acquisition spending primarily on tangible aspects?
8) Does your enterprise facilitate ability to change course on the way?
9) Do you deal with R&D cost Vs Benefits same as you deal with Cost price Vs Selling price?
10) Do you stay ahead of competition or follow it?

Enablement / Motivation

11) Does your leadership tend to notice the crisis manager more often than the one who avoids crises?
12) Does your enterprise recognize importance of incremental innovation?
13) Do you have an on-demand, two-way pipe between the business challenge and the idea sources?
14) Do you believe remuneration is good enough motivation for someone to innovate for you?
15) Have you visualized your junior employee taking a brilliant idea to implementation?

Somewhere between ‘why’ & ‘why not’ – that worthwhile journey begins.

Who stalled my innovation?

When innovation gets caught up on the way, it becomes a liability. Benefits which are scheduled to arrive and accounted for is delayed, while the investments made keep adding up. Failed innovation is a natural process; it takes 10 to get the 1 right, and is far better than the stalled effort.

The best place to start is to figure out if resistance is taking a toll. This typically happens towards the very beginning or towards the very end when key stakeholders are involved, who, like everybody else have natural tendency to resist change.

Check if the effort is spent in one direction, without a stock take, for too long. Form a steering committee external to the innovation team derived from a diverse background, which provides independent inputs periodically.

People pick signals from leadership, if a leader’s commitment is diluted or has backed off, then you will see the untold consequence on the ground.

The stalling factor for your enterprise innovation could be entirely different, which, only you can figure out and act on. And when you do, consider following,

1. Check if key people have left or withdrawn interest.
2. Check if budget got utilised elsewhere.
3. Check if it lacks an unbiased view. Form an external steering committee.
4. Check if you are hoarding it up, de-centralize innovation and look beyond the obvious.
5. Check if you need basic processes around innovation, like you have for other critical things.

Revival resembles being in new locality of a familiar town, to get back home, it is essential to catch the one going in the right direction!

Get rid of that label

Some of us get bogged down by what interests we showed in our early childhood, a teacher or a parent would have called us sporty, artistic, numerate or systematic. If one escapes from there, then the waiting corporate world would do something similar and assign us a 'role'!

An individual more often has an ear for only what labels others have assigned, or what she has assigned for self, more often in the areas we are supposed to earn our bread from. Similarly our creative instincts also get aligned to this mindset, though capable, we end up raising self designed hurdles against creative possibilities.

Labels play equally negative role in collaborative innovation.

1) Expecting a research engineer to shorten the duration on a car assembly line.

2) Expecting a productivity improvement unit of your company to improve productivity of your team.

3) Expecting a security guard at your premise to protect you from all security related threats.

As you see the labels are nothing more than anchors, the desired “outcome” however does not necessarily need to come out of the labels.

Don’t run to facility management for a facility improvement idea. Don’t congregate only the experts on subject for the innovation at hand.

A little story I read sometime back. A teenager, while going through the list of school sports he could participate on a sports day, wished there was ‘fishing’ in the list, as that is what he has done most in last few years. But then his eyes stopped on the 'long jump', a sport he has never attempted. It was while fishing he started jumping from one side of the stream to the other, at times he got wet while not making it to the other side, but the distance he jumped increased as he became more proficient.

As an individual your most promising expertise may not be in the domain of your work.

Get rid of that label; try a mask – the transient!

Learning from the collaborative innovation cases

While most of us are trying to understand and incorporate the collaborative innovation in our organizations, there are some people and organizations that have experienced it already, it makes lot of sense to understand these cases and learn from it.

I am starting a sister blog http://spotopen.blogspot.com/ which will act as a repository of the success and failures in open innovation, collaborative innovation, co-creation from across the world.

Though the information going in these case studies is already available at various places on the internet, I am trying to achieve following.

1) Single point for reference.
2) Classify the case study information in a predefined format. (E.g. Industry, extent of openness etc.)
3) Uncover the finer and otherwise hidden aspects of these success or failure cases.

The format for the case study along with the first case study is posted at http://spotopen.blogspot.com/

Please feel free to suggest any changes or additions in the format.

You can also suggest a case study or point me to the case study.

Metrics for Open Innovation – “what’s my open innovation quotient”

[One slightly disconnected thought! – Can percentage of people quitting from a particular organization and becoming an entrepreneur provide any kind of metric? More the better or less the better?]

Metrics have always amazed me, be it for how different people perceive it differently or for the conviction with which it can drive one away from facts! It has amazed me equally for its subtle power to steer one to the goals at hand..

This post is for you and me to come up with measurement criteria for an open innovation effort in an organization.

Thinking aloud for the pointers … a) Is my organization doing enough to promote open innovation, b) Where and how much to invest, c) Am I utilizing all possible resources, d) Metric can’t help me remove any mental blocks, but how can I keep the open innovation in say top 5 priorities e) What is the Return on investment, f) How much is the open innovation productivity, g) How much Risk I can take for how much return?

With this laundry list, let’s create the metrics, in no particular order.

Metric A: Open innovation budget allocation proportionate to the profitability hotspots.

First I need to track and arrive at the hotspots which have potential for open innovation. Then rank them according to the profitability per unit and volume it can fetch. Allocate the open innovation budget in the similar proportion while maintaining the hotspot diversity.

Overly simplified example - For a consumer durable product, the hotspots could be the pricing or psychology of a first time buyer, the yield per unit could be low and volume high. For a new techno yacht, yield per unit could be high and volume low.

Metric B: Extent of talent utilization from outside the core team.
Measure how much non core team individuals contributed from rest of the organization and/or from outside the organization.

Example / Pointers - How many idea-bar-camps my organization organized this quarter. Someone should be telling - we received 30 ideas from the core team, 70 from rest of the organization and another 50 from outside the organization for a given hotspot. In 2006, P&G’s 50% of the product and process ideas came from outside of P&G.

Metric C: Extent of Leadership involvement.
This one is bit difficult, but open innovation won’t take roots without it.
How much effort the leaders putting to leverage the opportunity of open innovation?

Example / Questions - How many times employees hear about the genuine support for open innovation from leadership? How much time does the leadership spend on open innovation vis-à-vis overall routine work. How recently your leaders heard and discussed the idea which came from outside the core team or from outside the organization.

Metric D: Percentage of skin
% of risk taken with respect to the investment in last one year. A conscious strategy to analyze and make Proactive + Reactive investment in future.

Example/ Questions – Was my TV ad budget for the existing service line far bigger than the innovation budget? Does my organization invest for short, medium and long term innovation outcomes or is there an imbalance?

Metric E: Percentage of fresh footprint
% of number of product, service, process or business model launched in last one, two, three year(s) which were not similar to the existing ones and had an open flavor.

Example/ Pointers – The ones where we changed the color and packaging may not be counted here, repurposing the same product for a new user group might. Still better is the one where you incorporated the end user feedback.

(A fair process to decide what is genuinely ‘open’ i.e. if the contribution came from outside the core group or not, and how much, is a different topic altogether and we will discuss this in subsequent posts.)

Metric F: Percentage of fresh dollars
% of revenue generated from NEW product, services, and processes launched in last one, two and three year(s)

Example / Pointers – Revenue from a really innovative product launched 5 years back be better kept off, and if it takes effort to associate the dollars as fresh dollars, its probably a wrong association!

Metrics are a very personal thing, each organization need to derive the ones which suites them. But as a rule of thumb, the metrics which resemble the simplicity of GPS, gives you the X, Y and Z coordinates of your current open innovation state, are more likely to take you where you intend to go.

When in Rome, why do what Romans do. My views on “open innovation”

In-house innovations are great, when the companies and individuals have the capability, when these innovations are utilized to address the market need, when one does not stop at one-off innovations and off course when these innovations does not cost earth. But these are the exact challenges you and me face with in-house innovations, one or more of the above is usually not true.

I believe that more and more companies are opening up to "open innovation" as an extended arm to their in-house innovation effort. BT, P&G, Nokia to name a few.

Open innovation, apart from giving you a wider perspective on the solution, can as well change your problem definition itself!

Organizations do innovations, and then wait for one of them to click, the new trend however is towards “on demand innovation”, benefit from it, and move on to next one. It does not matter from where the ideas come from, what matters is how much you can benefit from it.

Software as a service and now cloud computing, in open innovation you pay only for results, these new trends make essential services accessible and affordable.

You no longer write one on one snail mails, nor do you refer Britannica encyclopedia, your city has grown to become your country and your country has expanded and has now become the world, and you access the world from your desktop. This connected world has opened up the new ways of doing everything and innovation is no exception, future of innovation is “open”, the world has opened up, and so has everything you do.