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Why social networking is not innovation
By Jeffrey Philiips
As innovators, my firm and I are often called on to watch for and synthesize trends, so we can help our clients predict the future and create new products and services. One new trend we've been watching for a while is the concept of innovation using social networking and wisdom of crowds.
Gathering ideas
A number of new software products and websites have sprung up recently to encourage the submission of ideas - online idea suggestion boxes, social networking sites, innovation forums and many others. The most well-known and well-publicized site is Dell's IdeaStorm site. These sites allow anyone, anywhere to submit ideas about topics of interest to them. While there are some advantages to this approach, there are some significant concerns to think about before taking this approach. In particular:
- Keeping the idea generation focused on topics that are important to you
- Managing the volume of ideas - Dell's Ideastorm has over 9,000 currently
- Implementing a process to do something with the ideas beyond collecting and voting
- Gaining real insights beyond the expectations and knowledge of the crowd
If something seems too easy...
If it seems to be too easy to be true, then it's probably a new website. Innovation requires more than simply collecting a lot of ideas from a generally dispersed audience and allowing them to vote on the ideas they submitted. If you don't direct the idea generation into topics of interest to you, the suggestion box will be full of ideas of interest to the submitters but quite possibly at odds with your product or service strategy. Then you've collected ideas and set expectations about those ideas with your customers that you don't want to implement.
Drowning in ideas
Just as your IT team is drowning in data from all the system that they manage, this approach can literally drown the innovation team in ideas. As mentioned, Dell's IdeaStorm has over 9,000 ideas, and a well run, one or two week idea campaign can easily generate several hundred on one topic. Talk about finding a needle in a haystack! Then consider the time necessary to review and process those ideas. Assume for a second that each idea requires between five and ten minutes for a person to review and decide to move forward with, request more information or kill. 9,000 ideas at 5 minutes each (an underestimate) is 45,000 minutes or 750 hours - almost a third of a man-year just dedicated to a quick review of each idea. Then add in the fact that ideas from customers and partners need a legal review for IP ownership, and you'll see that more ideas is not always the best answer.
A lack of workflow
Many social networking sites and forums don't provide workflow or idea management beyond the capture of the idea and a simple voting or rating process. Idea capture is the easiest part of an innovation process, but the bottlenecks exist just downstream - effectively reviewing the ideas, evaluating them and transitioning them into new products or services or business models. Without an effective innovation process to manage the ideas after collection, innovation breaks down. Again, you've set the expectation that these ideas will be captured and reviewed. If not, the submitters will become frustrated and will refuse to submit ideas, and your innovation program and efforts will flounder.
Shallow ideas
A final concern with social networking and wisdom of crowds is that these programs primarily generate very incremental ideas, and since these approaches are very open, collaborative and web-based, they expose ideas to a large number of people. The larger the group, the more the thinking and ideas will revert to the mean. So you can't expect really insightful or disruptive ideas from this approach, nor can you expect that the ideas you generate from this approach are uniquely yours. Your competitors are listening to and engaging your customer base just as frequently as you are, so broadly distributed idea platforms will result in ideas that have been seen and reviewed by a number of firms.
Not a solution in and of themselves
So, just like brainstorming does not equal innovation, but is an important tool or component for innovation, many of these new trends around innovation and social networking are not complete solutions. In fact, they may become great distractions.
Generating a huge number of ideas that are relatively incremental doesn't add much to a firm's ability to innovate or differentiate, and may become a huge distraction from real disruptive possibilities.
Recognize that innovation is a complex function and that every tool - brainstorming, social networking, innovation processes, creativity and a whole list of others - all play into a robust innovation capability and model. No one solution provides all the answers.
Jeffrey Phillips is the VP of Sales and Marketing for OVO, a division of NetCentrics that is focused on innovation and idea management. It develops and markets web-based idea management solutions. You can contact Jeffrey at jphillips@ovoinnovation.com.
Published on 6/26/2008
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Comments: |
7/23/2008 by: Wim Soens
The concept of innovation using social networking and wisdom of crowds is much more than a trend. It's a necessity. Science and technology evolve so fast that companies can't handle the R&D process with internal resources only. Today, most companies are nowhere near tapping the potential of idea and innovation marketplaces. But mature, innovation-based companies like P&G lead the way. (e.g. P&G's "connect and develop" initiative) Although the concerns the author is referring to (quantity, quality, and assessment of ideas) are very real, this only goes for companies that stick to a closed and vertically integrated approach to innovation, driven by a linear innovation pipeline (which causes the bottlenecks).
Future successful innovators will be the ones that heavily invest in new collaborative capabilities and learn how to harvest external ideas. (Even if this means turning their R&D organization on its head). Social innovation is an opportunity, not a distraction. Smart companies should deal with it.
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7/14/2008 by: oddpodz
Perhaps it's time to create new positions in companies that seek to dip their toe in the social networking pool. The marketing dept is already busy with their current workload, and the IT dept is not suited to review every new idea that someone throws out - they are busy building complex, detailed plans and executing them, asking your IT dept if they can "just add this feature, or just tweak that" is a recipe for disaster. So, maybe there should be a person, or a group whose sole responsibility is to manage the input from the customers. Like Shaun said, simply throwing them in a black box is not the answer. The ideal candidate for this position will be Web 2.0 savvy and excellent at building online relationships and fostering community. If customers feel like they are being heard and responded to, that can create a wealth of customer loyalty. And, if some good ideas come out of it, that is a bonus. I think these tools are best suited for community building, less so for a company's next big idea.
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7/2/2008 by: Ingenesist
Grant, innovation is mathematical, just like money is mathematical. If not mathematical, and not money, and not social capital...then what? How would you define innovation? Remember, a definition must be measurable and repeatable - this is a serious challenge for all on this forum. Indeed there are countless consultants in whose best interest it is to propagate a "dark art" image of some elusive but valuable quantity with an inaccessible definition or language (ref: law, academia, medicine, innovation management) sometimes for good reason, sometimes not. Often we make the mistake of reflecting our definition upon the desired outcome rather than the required inputs. I believe this to be the case with the term "innovation."
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6/30/2008 by: Grant
Ingenesist: innovation is not mathematics... Social networking is not innovation, nor is it idea generation as this article suggests - that is just one use of social networking, which is much wider Social Network Analysis is the use of various tools - some automated, some not, to identify both the weak links between people (and ideas, thus the less common, and possibly less relevant ideas) as well as clusters of related ideas - which have potential to be the interesting ones to focus on. This approach is used to avoid the un-realistic scenario that it would take 750 hours to evaluate 9,000 ideas - it can be done in less - its surprising that the author, working for a company that helps manage ideas and innovation, would not discuss this too.
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6/30/2008 by: Ingenesist
The problem, I believe, lies in the definition of innovation, or some variant of: "a new idea with a useful (positive) economic outcome." Mathematically, this is a single equation with two unknowns, which is unsolvable and therefore inactionable. As such, the author's argument are equally as valid as the condition he rants against. Every person walking down the street needs an actionable definition for innovation - only then can it be organized. Innovation must be measurable and derived from knowledge and information. So I recommend the following:
Innovation is defined as the rate of change of knowledge with respect to time; and knowledge is defined as the rate of change of information with respect to time; and information is defined as facts and data. While this may seem inconvenient at first, it is a defensible, measurable, and actionable definition set. More importantly, it is absolutely the domain of social capital. Or, if not social capital, then what? I believe this to be the essence of both the article and the following comments.
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6/27/2008 by: Ezra Christensen
All are excellent points. One thing that I would add to the list is that disruptive innovations typically are rated low by existing customers. It is not that established firms didn't know or couldn't develop disruptive products (in some cases they had prototypes on the shelves) but because when they asked for customer feedback everything pointed to scrapping the project. While it may be tempting to prune the tree of ideas that grow from social networks by only spending time to seriously review those that rank high, doing so almost guarantees that you'll only be reviewing incremental ideas. The big ones that people did submit are now in the e-round file. That said, all these points are no different than potential pitfalls of any new approach; challenges to be overcome. While there may not be anything that can handle these challenges "off the shelf", there are ways to deal with them. That's the wonderful thing about innovation: things change and problems are solved.
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6/27/2008 by: KK
A lot of your comments above seem to do with getting focused ideas and removing information overload (its hard to add to a discussion with thousands of other people and risk repeating an idea). I would imagine the first step is finding the right people to add to the innovation discussion (funneling down). Any experience with this?
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6/27/2008 by: Shaun Dakin
Much of the value of these idea websites are around acting as if you are listening to your customers so that the company (see Dell) can promote the fact to the press and media. And, those customers that do submit ideas may gain greater brand loyalty for Dell - even though the idea is not a break through. So, I agree that they are a tool but there are additional spin off brand values that are associated with them. That being said, simply taking ideas and throwing them into a black box never to be seen again may make customers mad (no feedback loop).
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