I had the opportunity last week to attend the Spigit Innovation Summit as a guest of this month’s sponsor – Spigit. The event was held at the Ritz Carlton Half Moon Bay and featured headliners Andrew McAfee, Charlene Li, and Mike Maddock, along with several other speakers from the more than 100 Spigit clients in attendance.
The event was very lively and I’ve already shared many of the key insights from the event on the hashtag #spigit10 on twitter, but I’ll do my best to convey some of the things that I took away with me from the event.
Andrew McAfee, a professor at MIT and one of those responsible for focusing our attention on Enterprise 2.0, opened the event. His anchor case study was a dicussion of the game FoldIt, created to help tackle the mystery of protein folding. Think of it as man versus computer. Key insights included the fact that humans are better at visual and spacial challenges than computers, and that humans can out-do computers because they can see crazy, far-out ways of solving problems or winning problems. Ultimately, there are alternatives to using more experts (or algorithms) to solve problems, and it is important to remember that expertise is emergent. We assume that we know where the expertise is, but that isn’t always the case. Most of the best players at FoldIt have nothing beyond a high school education – they’re not professional biochemists.
Andrew McAfee also discussed his bullseye framework and talked about how twitter is a great tool up and down the tie types (strong, weak, potential, none). But at the same time, think about how we’ve evolved the Christmas letter and Rolodex into digitally connected networks of strong and weak ties. Andrew McAfee also threw out this fun fact – The US economy is 5.5x more IT intensive than it was 30 years ago – we are injecting massive amounts of IT spending.
Companies won’t necessarily be crowdsourcing everything or using open innovation to solve every problem though. Some of the most insightful companies Andrew McAfee has worked with have professional innovators and use community for refinement. But at the same time, the ‘A’ talent in our organizations are walking out the door if their knowledge working environment seems like something out of the 19th century. The takeaway is that organizations need to be organized to maximize internal intellectual capacity and interconnectedness AND external intellectual capacity (one of the best ways to get the diversity in thinking necessary to solve really hard problems). Think about how the FoldIt team re-cast a biochemistry problem as a spacial reasoning problem so that people with those skills could work on it (diversity).
My favorite audience contribution was a question about collaborative consumption (ala swap.com), which got me thinking about the disruptive opportunities for new or existing consumer electronics or consumer products company to re-imagine what cradle-to-grave or cradle-to-cradle might look like across a range of ‘customers’ for one item. Nobody talked about this at the conference, but I think it is an interesting idea nonetheless. If anyone big corporate wants to explore what this might mean for their market position, let me know.
Of the customer presentations, the City of Manor, Texas had some of the most interesting insights to share, such as the fact that they do a lot of offline marketing for their open innovation efforts (printing the leader board in the local paper, talking to people in coffee shops, etc.), and how they try and make it interesting by having fun prizes like mayor for a day, ride-along with the police chief, etc.
My favorite tweet had to be:
Shifting people from “mind-set” to “mind-sweat” is 1st step to innovation – You have to make people exercise outside their anchors
This was a tweet I came up with after Mike Maddock accidentally said “mind-sweat” instead of “mind-set”.
Patrick Asher of AT&T spoke about the importance of visualizations of the idea generation and idea evaluation processes to wider participation in their innovation efforts. I’ve dedicated an appendix in my upcoming book to visual frameworks that can help drive better idea generation, evaluation, and development performance. Patrick Asher also spoke about how leader boards can potentially be de-motivating to employees, and how people who participate a lot in the community actually get better at representing and advocating for their ideas than others.
Charlene Li spoke on the second day about open leadership – primarily about how leaders have to be willing to give up control in order to build and strengthen relationships with customers on-line, and how the technologies of social media may change but the relationships remain. Charlene also talked about the difference between open architecture (facebook, iphone) and open data access (twitter, guardian, bestbuy), and the engagement pyramid – watching, sharing, commenting, producing, curating. Apparently, 78% of US adults are “watching” via social media; 63% are sharing content; and less than 1% are curating. You can take Charlene Li’s openness audit here.
We heard from Charlene about Best Buy’s CEO creating a blog entry instead of a press release in response to an e-mail snafu, the importance of authenticity and transparency, and the importance of having a social media triage map so that everyone understands their roles, responsibilities, and the strategy. But, probably my favorite bit of Charlene Li’s talk was a small point about how in customer lifetime value, you shouldn’t forget to include the value of referrals, insights, support, and ideas. I also loved SAP’s audience comment about how they have a community buddy system to help make people feel at home in their community – like a neighbor would when you move into a new neighborhood. And, finally, Charlene made a good point about how when you’re talking with executives about measuring the ROI of social media, often you have to change the conversation to relationships – you have to translate into terms that any marketer would understand.
So, as you can see, a lot of ground was covered at the Spigit Innovation Summit, and a good time was definitely had by all. I apologize in advance to those who shared insights at the event that I didn’t capture in this article, and direct you to the tweet stream at #spigit10 for any that I may have missed.
Finally, on a personal note. The attendees at the conference were the very first people to get a sneak peek at my first book – Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire – in the form of a free sample chapter that will be next available in electronic form on September 1, 2010 only to people signed up for our monthly newsletter by EOD August 31, 2010. Sign up here.
Don’t miss an article (1,600+) – Subscribe to our RSS feed and join our Continuous Innovation group!
Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also the author of the forthcoming book “Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire” from John Wiley & Sons.
Pingback: Anonymous
Hi Braden,
I attended the Spigit summit and as a Spigit client (onlybone from Australia) found it very insightful. I was hoping if can refer me to good articles or websites on “innovation communities” or “crowdsourcing” etc. We just implemented Spigit in our organization and wanted to learn about best practices, strategies or learnings with similar corporate implementation.
Franki..
You should check out Brightidea.com’s blog and look at attending our “Birds of a Feather” conferences to collaborate with real world particitioners in “innovation communities” and “crowdsourcing”:
http://blog.brightidea.com/
From what I read about the Spigit conference, there weren’t may people who actually used or got value out of their software.
See this blog about the conference:
“Truthfully, most people struggled to say how the tool had been useful to date“ http://bit.ly/dnXuAK
Vincent
Braden,
Good to hear Collaborative Consumption was a hot topic. Swapping is just one dimension of the idea. Technology and peer communities are bring back old market behavors – sharing, bartering, renting, lending and swapping – but they are being reinvented in ways and on a scale never possible before.
Here is a short animation I made about the idea. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br7LAsAOcpM&feature=related
Rachel Botsman
http://www.collaborativeconsumption.com
Which came first, the problem or the sotuilon? Luckily it doesn’t matter.