Crowdsourcing. It’s one controversial yet increasingly popular topic. From marketing agencies to scientific research, many industries are taking a hard look at how crowdsourcing may be a solution for problems too big for one person or even one company to solve.
But why is crowdsourcing catching on—and how will it affect the future?
The specific solution varies by industry, but for most, crowdsourcing is a low cost way to acquire a greater (in quantity—and hopefully in quality) solution set to a defined problem. In other words, crowdsourcing is fulfilling an unmet need for many industries—the need to attain more for less. But what about the flip side of crowdsourcing? What about the consumers?
Without willing participants, crowdsourcing simply doesn’t work. If people are unwilling to participate, then there’s no content. And that chance is a big gamble. So what makes people want to contribute their time and effort?
A cause. Beyond cash, (see Chicago based CrowdSpring for an example of how some people make a living from the flip side of crowdsourcing) most people find that either helping others or contributing to a cause is a worthwhile investment—a good reason to be part of the crowd.
Take a look at the Aha mobile app, for instance. Sure, Aha guides users via GPS, allows users to customize food alerts on the travel path and has even been designed with a 65MPH-safe interface. But it’s the community aspect that sets it apart. Aha is a driver to driver network that connects drivers to each other and to relevant information from the internet. For instance, if a user is motoring down a busy interstate and traffic suddenly slows due to an accident, that user can record a voice memo alerting fellow drivers traveling (or planning to travel) down the same roadway. After all, news does travel faster via networks as proved by events like the Hudson River plane crash in January of 2009—the public was notified via Twitter first, not by mainstream media—an example of self-initiated, crowdsourced news reporting.
And speaking of networks, Facebook has also integrated crowdsourcing to solve content and policy problems—The Facebook Community Council. This council is a crowdsourced tagging application open to only select members. And once invited, the user can tag content that has been pulled for review with one of 8 tags—Spam, Not English, Skip, Nudity, Drugs, Attacking, and Violence. In effect, Facebook users are now patrolling the network for free in an attempt to keep up with content created and shared by its 350 million users.
The most innovative companies of the near future will replace less efficient and commoditized processes with crowdsourcing to bring tangible value to stakeholders and consumers through increased operating efficiency and higher quality products, services, and business models.
What areas of your industry could benefit from crowdsourcing, and how will it affect you?
A healthy innovation pipeline requires an understanding of the customer. By organizing customer information and making it easily available to decision makers in the company, you open up the gates of innovation. There are many tools available today to organize and extend the value of a customer database.
“Can you describe your customers for me?” Ask that question of a company with a healthy innovation pipeline and the answer will be timely, thoughtful and reflective of distinct profitable segments.
At companies struggling to maintain relevancy in the marketplace, however, customer information is often old, anecdotal, or biased; maintaining a momentum that can destroy a critical connection in the company’s innovation pipeline.
This difference has become more apparent as companies fail in this credit starved economy.
The problem is not always that companies are not finding out about customers, it often is that they have not made the effort to organize the data. Enter customer management technology. You can call it Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Management Software, or Sales Automation (SA), but it all amounts to storing information in a way that facilitates a consistent, timely and descriptive understanding of your existing customer base.
A former client in the beer industry used Salesforce.com Dashboards to provide real-time information to brand managers about their customers (and non-customers). Even though they didn’t transact directly with end customers, they aggregated surveys, customer inquiries, and third-party studies coming from different functional areas of the organization at an individual level (when possible). In this case, decisions about sports sponsorship, promotion and marketing programs reflected the customers’ changing tastes and interests. They didn’t have to wait for a meeting to discuss the information to be gathered — it was on their desktop.
Using technology to track customer information is no longer just for the big guys. There is an offering to fit every business size. From products like Salesforce.com that can be purchased and up and running in a month, to customer data mining applications that take enterprise level integration efforts.
Additionally there is a robust marketplace of applications that work with these systems. Salesforce.com’s AppExchange has add-ons that put powerful survey, email campaign, analysis, and visualization tools in reach of your employees. Riskonnect ERM is one of the most innovative risk management tools that I have seen. It provides a visualization framework that can be customized with information such as customer satisfaction or life-stage distribution.
The potential uses of organized customer information can feed marketing, product development and even M&A activity. The claim of a merger based on complimentary customer bases would be far more convincing with the means to quantify it.
Innovation happens because employees care about meeting customer needs. Thus, meeting customers should be a core competency of every business.
Making predictions is no easy business. Take this, for example:
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
— Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), maker of mainframe computers, arguing against the PC in 1977.
But, with accurate insights and reflection and analysis of those insights, we can begin to develop a sense of what the future might hold. For 2010, many are predicting change to occur in technology, pop culture and personal life. Here’s what we think is next for products, services, and business models:
The integration of Conscious Capitalism will spur long-term growth.
Conscious capitalism is a way of thinking about "social responsibility," the idea that an organization (government, nonprofit, business) has an obligation to act not only in its own best interests but also in those of all its stakeholders (customers, employees, suppliers, investors, society).
In the developing consumer driven market, companies will no longer be responsible to only their investors—not if they want sustainable profit, anyway. Instead, companies will either adopt Conscious Capitalism or be forced to once they realize that doing good allows businesses to advance beyond previous limitations.
And the proponents of this change? First of all, they will be people like John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods. Along with John Mackey, many CEOs in parallel industries have already built the essence of Conscious Capitalism into their business models.
Secondly, but more importantly, the consumers will drive this change. With the power to choose products and services created by companies who no longer see business as a machine driven by profit only, consumers will exercise this measure of control to empower corporations and facilitate change for the world.
Vertical learning will be of increasingly high value.
Vertical Learning is the pursuit of knowledge of our own assumptions, ways of interpreting experience and our beliefs. But, it has been long overlooked and placed secondary to Horizontal Learning—knowledge acquired through training, education and work experience—expanding our skill sets, in short.
Horizontal Learning is, of course, absolutely necessary. For instance, those who want to design products must learn the proper techniques and acquire the necessary technological information to do so. But Vertical Learning is seen as a lesser skill—introspection is not currently viewed with equal value.
However, with the two working in tandem, we are less likely to think about products, services, and business models in binary terms. Instead, we are encouraged to “think through” and think around the obvious obstacles to innovation and renovation—therefore building something of far higher worth.
If we take both into account, we can better see developing trends with objectivity in relation to each other and discern the implications of those relationships as opposed to seeing the individual issues and tasks involved in innovation.
Although making predictions can be tricky, there’s nothing outrageous about our predictions and other future trends. After all, businesses and consumers are ready for positive change in the world—the most successful companies of 2010 and beyond will embrace this unmet consumer need.
The slower our economy seems to get, the faster the opportunities come and go for you “big game” hunters with your big innovation guns.
1) Are you a magnet for “big game?”
2) Are you ready?
3) Are you capitalizing and enjoying the results?
The answers depend on your organization’s perspective/definition of the word “YOU.”
“YOU” might be the collective (your whole unit/team) or “YOU” might be the individual (an army of one). If it’s the latter, you are a one-man band—opt out now, stop reading, you don’t need anybody’s help conquering the world. Insights, ideas, communication and execution are all you. I’ve never met you, but I suspect you’re a mad genius and/or a train wreck.
If it’s the former (collective “you”), and you’re on an innovation quest to achieve great things with wildly talented people—you already appreciate that innovation is a team sport.
So, lets check out the team you have (and the team you deserve.) Take a look around your organization. In my experience, when you do look around (with eyes wide open), the best-case scenario is:
• 1/3 of your team is a strong reflection of you and your company’s quest • 1/3 of your team could be a reflection of you, but don’t know about your quest • 1/3 of your team doesn’t care, because they don’t know how much you care about the quest or why they should
Now the question isn’t about you after all, it’s about the ecosystem you’re creating. As the leader/architect/almighty designer of the organization and the culture that feeds it, you know the optimal design for readiness is a wholehearted culture, NOT one of thirds. Own it. Fix it. Optimize your culture of innovation and stack the odds in your favor. Successful companies driven by innovation are built to create their own innovation “luck” where preparation meets opportunity, where concepts meet needs and where speed, focus and timing are everything. And that’s not luck, that’s a premeditated commitment to the things that matter.
Are you committed to being perpetually ready for today’s opportunity and tomorrow’s battle?
Today’s innovations settle for nothing less, why would you?
Let’s say you’re driving home from work when all of a sudden your front left tire drops into a massive pothole causing you to swerve right. Luckily, there are no cars in the right lane, but regardless you’ve narrowly avoided an accident, and with good reason, you’re upset.
So what?
Well, a few years ago, you might have complained to your friend in the passenger seat and just kept on driving. But now, people have the power to report local issues with the click of a few buttons and the power of GPS.
City residents can now use an app like SeeClickFix, a mobile application that allows its users to take a photo of a pothole, a burnt out street light, fresh graffiti—basically anything that needs to be fixed by the local government—and report it using a mobile GPS device. Along with a photo and GPS location, users can add notes and track progress, as well as receive and view alerts on nearby city issues. Then, users can see how many other people have reported the same issue and monitor the most reported, a.k.a “hot issues” in the selected city.
Just one app out of the many that have been dubbed “Gov 2.0” by the tech community, SeeClickFix is utilizing GPS location in an attempt to make local government more efficient and responsive—and the app supports a trend that we’ve watched develop over the last decade called “Track Me, Help Me.”
The “Track Me, Help Me” trend was sparked by recognition of not only the popularity and functionality of GPS navigational systems on-board mobile devices, but also by the recognition of consumer willingness to offer up a very valuable piece of the puzzle:
Location, location, location.
Many people with smart phones have come to depend on apps like Google Maps, but now, as demonstrated by apps like SeeClickFix, people are ready to take location to the next level. Whether it be the power to innovate local government operations or the pleasure of playing virtual put-put, consumers are receiving relevant benefits when they give this information away—more evidence of not only “Track Me, Help Me,” but also of the evolving consumer-driven market.
But the GPS centric apps currently available are just the tip of the ice burg. As app developers begin working in tighter conjunction with the government, corporations and organizations, GPS innovation will be streamlined and even more integrated into our daily lives. In fact, many industries have just now recognized this trend and are developing applications to catch up to this unmet consumer need, meaning that even more people will be saying “Track Me, Help Me” while being enabled to accomplish tasks—no matter how big—with efficiency.
It is easy to blame chief executives and senior management for not devoting enough attention to introducing new products, but that is too simplistic an explanation for why radically new products are so rare. Marketers deserve some of the blame for at least three reasons:
Successful strategic innovations need more than a great idea.
There's no shortage of new product concepts. We are willing to bet you could come up with a handful of intriguing ones before lunch if you set your mind to it.
But new ideas by themselves are worthless. You need to move from idea to execution, and that is where the majority of companies stumble. You need a new-product development process—one that is codified, efficient, and repeatable, and which allows you to turn a notion into something you can sell.
But there aren't a lot of marketers who have tried to formalize a new-product introduction. Too often, marketers see their job as simply coming up with the idea. They leave the actual development and production to someone else and then profess to be surprised when the finished product is not exactly what they had envisaged. (This is true, by the way, whether we are talking about introducing new consumer products or selling business-to-business.) It is always nice to have someone else to blame when something goes wrong—such as, the product didn't sell. But it isn't the best use of your time, or of company resources.
The takeaway point from all this is that you want to create a process that will allow you to introduce a new product the same way every time. The procedure needs to be replicable—and easily understood internally—so you can train new hires to execute it. The process should become a legacy in your organization.
There is a shortage of Renaissance men (and women).
This builds off the previous point. As we have just seen, there are two distinct components to developing a successful new product: Coming up with the idea and then putting it into practice—i.e., executing it. We must make sure that it is produced exactly as designed and that the marketing that follows is consistent with the overall message the product is supposed to communicate. Failure can arise when we look for people who possess both skills, but in reality such people are extremely hard to find in any organization. Most people are naturally better at one or the other part of the process.
Instead of looking for someone who is good at both, it would seem more efficient to let people do what they do best. Since most companies have people who are fairly good at carrying out a mission once it is defined for them, it probably makes more sense to keep that capability in-house, and to look to outside resources to help you discover new ideas and fresh needs in the marketplace. Once the outside firm has unearthed those opportunities, the company can develop them.
Marketers tend to be fatalistic.
Marketers seem to go into new-product introductions with the expectation that they are going to fail. So they deal with new-product failures rather like the way an overweight person does with their problem: We periodically make half-hearted efforts to fix things…and then give up.
Just like someone who resigns himself or herself to being overweight, marketers conclude that there is nothing they can do to improve their batting average when it comes to introducing new products. Instead of throwing up their hands and saying "woe is me," they should be studying their past successes to see what they should do the next time they introduce something new.
That, of course, takes us full circle, underscoring as it does the need to have a replicable process to make new product development as painless as possible.
Blaming the CEO and others for not being more supportive about new product development is a waste of both time and mental energy. Look in the mirror and try to figure out how to make things better. Addressing the three problems we just talked about is a good start.
Certain fundamental tensions exist everywhere. In our personal lives it's "spend now or save for retirement?" In sports the question is often "bet it all on winning this year, or build for the long-term?"
It's no different in business. Do you give in to the temptation of immediate gratification—satisfying Wall Street for this quarter—or increase the research and development budget?
The tension is never more apparent than when trying to balance the innovation pipeline against the needs of your sales force to have something new to sell today.
Know Your Sales Force
We've done lots of work with companies that are sales-driven. Our first customer (nearly 20 years ago) was Superior Coffee & Foods—now part of Sara Lee. We've also helped Keebler create new products quarterly for Sam's Club and Costco and worked with food-service and manufacturing giants driven by sales forces that have an insatiable desire for new products. Lately we've done a lot of work around agent-driven industries like life insurance. All of these experiences have made us acutely aware of the roles speed, ego, business models, instant results and inertia play in sales-driven cultures.
These are the things you need to remember about salespeople. They:
• Need almost immediate results • Get bored with ideas quickly, so they need a short-term pipeline • Become dependent on "innovation news" as a way to sell • "Eat their own young" if they are not busy or happy. We once worked with a company who had gone from having the best year in history to dysfunctional feuding because they lacked a pipeline of new things to sell. • Are numbers driven—sometimes to a fault—which isn't surprising since the best are often paid on commission.
The excellent news is the innovation bar can be set fairly low when it comes to satisfying what the sales force needs. Salespeople are often happy with evolution, not revolution:
• ShinyGlow cleaner with new packaging graphics • ShinyGlow cleaner with a new, resealable top • ShinyGlow cleaner in an applicator pen • ShinyGlow cleaner "now with static guard" • ShinyGlow cleaner in an easy-to-pour package • ShinyGlow cleaner with built-in sunshine softener
These types of ideas are usually easy to come up with and to execute, and are often created in response to a competitor's product. If the sales group likes these ideas, they tend to be successful because the salespeople work harder to make them a reality.
Sales Teams as Innovators
Salespeople are great innovation advocates. They get excited. They know a ton about your customers and their business. They'll fight for their own ideas and will them into success.
Here's the best news about salespeople: They often feel neglected. Not many companies do a good job of leveraging the excitement they show for your product. If you can harness what your sales team knows and the energy they bring, you will have a huge competitive advantage.
How do you do that? Here are five ideas:
• VOS. Voice-of-the-customer research is the cornerstone of new product development. In your case, voice-of-the-salesperson research is just as important. There are many techniques to regularly enlist the minds and hearts of your salespeople. Success criteria should come largely from them. Platforms should come largely from them. Ideas should come from them. For example, arm your sales force with Flip Video cameras or explorer journals. Ask them to capture competitive insights, opportunities, or what's on their wish lists. They see things out there that you should know about.
• Enlist the alpha influencers. Sales teams are like packs. There is an alpha. Actively tapping these influencers is amazingly powerful. Imagine having them present your (their) innovation pipeline. We recently used this technique and got a standing ovation from 200 insurance agents. They did not realize they were applauding their own new product and service ideas. (Or did they?) Planned and facilitated round tables with sales alphas are a highly effective way of creating this type of buy-in and momentum.
• Create short-term and long-term pipeline tracks/projects. The goal is to help the sales team create their short-term innovation "fix" and sales goals while they envision what the future can and should look like. With their short-term needs addressed, we are free to help them create an exciting future via new products, services, and business models. Every meeting we review where we are in the short term vs. the long term and adjust the pipeline accordingly. An example would be to focus on their next two sell-in meetings with quick ideas. At the same time, work on ideas that are five years out.
• Make it fun. Why do all the marketing people get to come up with the ideas that others have to sell? Schedule regular, engaging, and fun brainstorming sessions. Use the insights your salespeople brought you in your VOS meetings to build innovation platforms. Let the world know that the sales group came up with the ideas. Give away innovation awards. You can plan and facilitate these quarterly meetings and more importantly, screen and prep the right alphas to be in them.
• Educate. Along the way, stop and inform the sales group about the techniques you are employing. Make them aware that the work you are doing together is critical. Help them build concepts. Share research findings with them. Make them appreciate the rigor that great ideas and their thoughts deserve.
We love working with salespeople. Companies that have learned how to use them to drive innovation are not only faster to market but more connected with their customers (and, of course, more successful).
Does innovation that requires the complete renovation of technologies, ideas and even personnel be performed efficiently, or can a company reinvent rapidly while re-working everything?
Hank Adams, CEO of Sportvision, explains how companies can use materials that already exist to implement new products, services, and business models efficiently.
Hank is a member of the Maddock Douglas Global Expert Network, an exclusive group of thinkers that includes entrepreneurs, professionals and specialists. GEN members span the globe and are hand picked to provide insight and expertise for specific opportunities and challenges. These experts often come from a parallel industry or have a specialized skill that relates to the challenge at hand. And this cross-section of thinking creates relevant, and frequently groundbreaking, ideas. Do you have a GEN? And if not, how do you plan to infuse outside expertise into your next big challenge?
The winner of the Wall Street Journal 2009 Technology Innovation Awards is on pace to change the world. Sure, Tapulous, the maker of the hit, one million dollar per month games is changing the face of mobile gaming technology—but technology innovations that hold the promise of making everyday life better for millions of people across the world are the ones to watch.
Ibis Biosciences' T5000 sensor, which won Gold at this year’s awards, allows for the detection of unknown organisms—a viable solution for the identification of novel infectious diseases. In short, the T5000 is intended to answer the question: "What microorganisms are in my sample?"
How will this apply to us? Take a virus like H1N1 as an example—immediate detection and strain identification can help protect the masses and make responding appropriately to unknown diseases faster and easier—which could mean saving lives.
Ibis Biosciences Inc. developed the sensor to fill an unmet need—rapid identification of the unknown. And the T5000, the product that meets that need, is the first in a long line of rapid detection mechanisms that will alter the way we respond to disease.
But what about the communication that connects the two?
As disintermediation begins to fundamentally change industries, consumers will start demanding bioscience and healthcare communication that’s easier to digest. People want a deeper understanding of the bioscience (and tertiary) technologies that have the ability to change their lives.
Crowdsourcing. It’s one controversial yet increasingly popular topic. From marketing agencies to scientific research, many industries are taking a hard look at how 
Take a look at the 
Making predictions is no easy business. Take this, for example:
The slower our economy seems to get, the faster the opportunities come and go for you “big game” hunters with your big innovation guns.
Let’s say you’re driving home from work when all of a sudden your front left tire drops into a massive pothole causing you to swerve right. Luckily, there are no cars in the right lane, but regardless you’ve narrowly avoided an accident, and with good reason, you’re upset. 
Drive your innovation platform—and increase sales— by making use of your salespeople's front-line customer contact and thirst for new products
How will this apply to us? Take a virus like H1N1 as an example—immediate detection and strain identification can help protect the masses and make responding appropriately to unknown diseases faster and easier—which could mean saving lives.
