Author Archives: Andrea Meyer
Point: Crowdsourcing is maturing beyond its amateur-content and open innovation origins toward core business processes. Story: In the beginning, companies used crowdsourcing as part of their open innovation efforts to get new ideas from lead users, customers, and the world at large. But now, entrepreneurial companies such as Trada and CloudCrowd are moving beyond one-off design efforts and contests (e.g., the Netflix Prize) to encompass routine everyday business processes. As CloudCrowd CEO Alex Edelstein sees it, “similar to the way Henry Ford’s early assembly lines created a new, more efficient way to complete work, we’ve designed an online process that delivers accurate finished work for even complex projects at a significant savings.” Let’s look at these two examples. First, Trada Inc., which recently emerged from stealth mode private beta, offers crowds of pay-per-click experts who create paid-search marketing campaigns. Each vetted crowd member generates his/her own keywords, ad copy, and … Continue reading
Point: Accelerate innovation by finding an analogous solution from a different industry.Story: Henry Ford’s assembly line is often touted as a breakthrough innovation. What’s less known is that Ford got the idea by seeing the “disassembly line” process of butchering hogs at the Philip Armour meatpacking company in Chicago. Similar techniques were also already being used by Campbell’s to automate canned food production.Adopting ideas from other industries and applying them to your own industry is a powerful and proven source of innovation. But what if you don’t know which industry to examine, or where to look for that potentially breakthrough idea? Solutions may arrive serendipitously as you visit companies and read widely, but how do you accelerate the process and make it systematic?One exciting solution I came across was described by Jim Todhunter, CTO of Invention Machine at the Open Innovation Summit last month. Invention Machine’s Goldfire software uses semantic … Continue reading
Point: By picking where open innovation occurs and what it communicates to the rest of the organization, innovators can protect open innovation efforts from corporate antibodiesStory: All organizations, especially large ones, have an “immune system” in the form of an army of fine-tuned antibodies that root out risk and threats to the smooth-operating status quo. These antibodies help drive efficiencies, attack waste, promote uniform performance, and prevent infection for foreign ideas.That’s good for efficiency, but innovation requires taking risks and changing the status quo to create more value. That makes innovation a prime target for the cleansing action of antibodies. Open innovation (OI) is especially prone to antibody response because it involves foreign ideas. At the December 2009 Open Innovation Summit, presenters from HP, CSC, Clorox, and Shell described how they avoided corporate antibodies at their companies. The techniques addressed who participates in open innovation, where they operate, and what … Continue reading
Point: Teams that create the best innovations know how to disagree about ideas without interpreting the disagreement as a personal affront.Story: “I feel good when I see that engineering, advertising and manufacturing are really surfacing and talking about their differences,” said the VP of Technology at a successful $100 million firm. “It’s my job to keep the dialectic alive.”When we see companies moving swiftly, anticipating changes in the marketplace and developing new products or services to meet the change, we’re tempted to think of the company as moving in harmonious agreement toward that new product or service.But the surprising fact is that companies that innovate the fastest are actually those that invite debate over ideas. It’s not a destructive conflict, but an airing of different views on a topic. Whereas conflict based on personality differences is destructive, healthy conflict focuses on refining a proposed idea. Healthy conflict gets a team … Continue reading
Point: Behind-the-scenes innovation makes visible innovation shineStory: I saw the premiere of KOOZA in Denver last week. Actually, it was my second time seeing KOOZA (the first was in Boston), and it was even better the second time.The first time, I was mesmerized by the overt innovations in the show, like the “Wheel of Death.” Imagine two connected hamster-wheels, each of which spin while both together revolve vertically as well. Suspended high above the stage, the performers run, dive and somersault inside the wheels. And just when it looks like the act couldn’t get any more thrilling, the performers switch to running on the outside of the wheel.My second time at KOOZA, I sat in the second row, so I had a closer look at the costumes. Even from the very last row (where I sat the first time), I remember the dazzling shine of the juggler’s suit. The second … Continue reading
Point: Innovation doesn’t have to be expensiveStory:Current surveys indicate that more companies are reducing innovation budgets this year, but the good news is that innovation doesn’t have to be expensive. Here are two stories that show how to innovate inexpensively:J.B. Hunt was just a truck driver in the 1940s when he saw that rice mills in Arkansas were disposing of rice hulls by burning them. Rice hulls are the fluffy tough fibrous shells removed to create white rice. The waste hulls gave Hunt an idea: he contracted with the mills to haul away their rice hulls, and then he sold the hulls to poultry farmers as chicken-house litter. After Hunt’s revelation of the potential value of rice hulls, others found additional innovative uses for the material: pillow stuffing, high-fiber additives for pet food, natural building insulation, filler for injection-molded plastics, and using rice hulls to improve apple juice extraction.Similarly, …
