‘Gain-Storming’ Social Innovation Management

Some of our clients know they have to get their customers and employees more engaged through the use of the super popular social software technologies they see in the public domain. We consult with them to help them better understand the opportunities as they relate to that business and as such, there are some specific things that won’t apply to everyone…and then there are.

This presentation should provide the social web novice with some insight and fuel some thought for how the opportunities might relate to their business.

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Collective intelligence (CI) can also be defined as a form of networking enabled by the rise of communications technology, namely the Internet. Web 2.0 has enabled interactivity and thus, participants are able to generate their own content.

Collective Intelligence draws on this to enhance the social pool of existing knowledge. Henry Jenkins, a key theorist of new media and media convergence draws on the theory that collective intelligence can be attributed to media convergence and participatory culture. Collective intelligence is not merely a quantitative contribution of information from all cultures, it is also qualitative.

Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task (also known as community-based design and distributed participatory design), refine an algorithm or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data (see also citizen science).

The term has become popular with business authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0technologies to achieve business goals

In addition to all of the activities required to maintain and build a vibrant and engaged on-line community, whether it be internal or external, ongoing systems administration aspect is paramount to success. This function is frequently overlooked or not given high enough priority by the business.

My focus for innovation/community management tools is to deliver a system that is tailored to existing business infrastructure (while allowing for growth and integration). The more tailoring that is required to meet reporting requirements, workflow, automation, profiles, multitudes of users and stakeholders, the more complex the back-end system can become.

 Of course, this complexity needs to be invisible to the community and to those who manage the workflow aspects of the community, but what about the system itself? Changing settings, moving web parts, changing campaigns, colours, profiles, categories etc etc.

.net applications for example, provide some user friendly interfaces for administrators, but depending on what your’e doing, there are still some aspects that require technical skill. I have found it is those aspects that people like to, and think they are capable of tampering with.

To deliver the front end simplicity to meet the lowest common user denominator [generally] requires some back-end functionality that needs to be managed/administrated by someone who has a good grasp of the system technologies. (A CM is usually the best person for this job). 

The back end of a highly tailored system, especially one that has many end and business users, needs special care. I have seen people make changes with no appreciation for the flow-on effects of those changes, so when it all goes pear-shaped, they blame the system/developer, not their own technical limitations.

This finger pointing brings a whole raft of unpleasant side-effects that will ultimately compromise the success of the system and disengage both the community and the business.

The lesson here is: DON’T let anyone near the back-end of the system who does not have the technical skill required to manage it, and who does not know how to manage the relationships with the people who can.

Your harshest critics (and greatest advocates) will always be those at the receiving end of your products, processes and services. If you make it easy for them to tell you what they think of your business, AND you have the constructs to act or at the very least, can respond appropriately to this feedback, then you will have continued access to their wallets, and to those they tell of the experience.

I believe that businesses that focus on complaint and customer feedback capture have an opportunity to evolve from what essentially is a negative forum, to a more positive interaction with their customers that delivers the same data, but drives a different customer culture.

We know that moving a customer from a neutral position to a position of advocacy is powerful, but moving a customer from a dissatisfied position to one of advocacy, increases the strength of that advocacy.

Here’s a little graphic to represent the concept:

By inviting customers to frame their greivances into improvement opportunities, you begin the shift from complaint management, to customer innovation management. This is also a process improvement because it removes the step/responsibility (and a big one it is) where the complaint then has to be re-positioned into an opportunity. This will increase the strength of their advocacy.

From my experiences with dedicated complaint resolvers, they are not too good at (or interested in) doing this.

The language and categorisation you use in your capture mechanism is key to driving this shift. It’s important to note that external customers won’t be as accommodating as employees with respect to keeping them informed, so make sure you’re geared to manage the information that comes through from that space.

Our systems automate much of this and we encourage clients to consider the copy in automated email responses as they would any customer marketing messages – keep the language ’on-brand’.

Keep the categories simple. Internal capture can be a little more detailed because mostly, your people have a more intimate knowledge of the business and can more precisely identify with your categories. Your customer categories certainly need to align to the ones you use for your employee system for reporting purposes, but scale them back (and make them more customer centric) or you’ll get too many misdirected ideas that will add to your workflow.

The success of any Innovation Management or Community platform is very much dependant on the ‘quality’ of the Community Manager (CM) or Sponsor.

RWW provides an excellent overview of the Community Manager role as it applies to start-ups, and I feel that it also relates to any business, big or small, new or established, deploying any Web2.0 strategy.

There are some big companies here in Australia about to toe dip into community collaboration to improve the business and better engage internal and external customers.

I’ve seen it work, and I’ve seen it fail, and I know the success (or otherwise) has related directly to the choice of or priority placed on having access to the right CM.

Based on my experience with community platforms, these are the key attributes of a CM:

• Passionate about Web.2.0 and the network effect
• Entrepreneurial and energetic
• Customer focused
• Has a solid grasp of user interface design
• Understands enough of the technical aspects of web design to estimate time/cost of solutions
• Quickly grasps technical concepts
• Can translate the business requirement to the developer and developer capability to the business
• Passionate about and competent with Continuous Improvement methodologies
• Effective change and stakeholder manager
• They are agile and can promote/facilitate the shift in business thinking to enable agile development
• Project Management
• Passionate about Collaboration, Creativity and Innovation
• Understands the network effect and the power of collective intelligence and how they can apply to the business need
• Excellent presentation and public speaking skills

Some of the key accountabilities of the CM are:

• Quickly identifies the business application/opportunity of new web technologies and can project manage those opportunities or facilitates those who will
• Manages the relationships between the business and the developers (there are developers out there who are so passionate about the social web opportunities, they will give away some freebies to help the client fully maximise the benefits…and then some)
• Activley promotes a culture of creativity and collaboration and is (the very visible) ‘Innovation Champion’ 
• Where able, acts as the ‘on-site’ person during development to facilitate the business engagement required to ensure success
• Prepares and presents proposals to the client
• Seeks new business
• Manages ongoing relationships with clients after the job is delivered and promotes and proposes new opportunities where relevant and as they arise

So it’s not just the startups. A good CM is a critical part of the overall business strategy as it relates to Web2.0, whether that business is the developer or the client.

For businesses that don’t feel the need to have a dedicated in house CM resource, make sure the development team you pay to do your Web2.0 work, has a good CM.

Ideas have value…even the crappy ones. Why? Because if you manage the crappy ideas as you would the great ones, initiators will strive to become better at spotting opportunities that will deliver, while moving themselves further up the reward and recognition chain. 

  If you want to avoid your super-duper idea capture system turning into a water-stained, particle board suggestion-box that people stuff their Snickers bars wrappers into when they cant find a bin, you must be enabled to not only ‘harvest”; you must also ‘harness’ creative output. 

Even a basic Continuous Improvement (CI) framework will allow your business to benefit from staff or customer ideas. It doesn’t matter whether you apply a high-level DMAIC or a full-blown Six Sigma process to those ideas deemed to have commercial merit, without a framework to bring rigour to the management of ideas…it’s just lip service. 

If you can’t ‘harness what you harvest’, any creative momentum you generate at roll-out time will be lost once idea initiators realise the business is not geared up to actually DO something with their creative efforts. And while staff might be forgiving if you fall down in this space, if you rolled this out to your customers and can’t show evidence of a commitment to even a basic CI cycle operating out back in the pumphouse, you’re unlikely to ever see their wallets again.

 I’d have an ethical issue providing any innovation managent or collaboration platform without some basic tools and tips to enable even a basic level of CI capability in the business.  

Tapping into Voice Of the Business & Voice Of the Customer (VOB and VOC) is a significant business commitment and done properly, you’ll not only create a creative culture of innovation for your business, but you’ll also drive the behaviour (and this is particularly evident with staff) that makes people more attuned to recognising opportunities for improvement and framing those as ideas, as distinct from recognising issues and simply complaining about them.

 Build the CI capability first. Engage those parts of the business that stand to benefit from the ideas and ensure they are enabled to, where appropriate, take ideas from concept to reality.

In my next post, I want to share with you some ideas we have seen that show an idea capture system operating in its most advantageous embodiment. That will set the scene for some discussion around Reward and Recognition.