I was thinking back to the Business 2.0 article I read three years ago that sparked the idea for this blog. It was called "Companies Tap Into Consumer Passion", and this exerpt offers a good summary:
Let's face it: Your best customers, as a collective, are probably better informed than you are. In the time it takes you to organize a meeting about a new product, they can devour enough information to develop a more sophisticated understanding of your products and competitors than you could possibly imagine. They will always be more passionate than you, because you just work for a paycheck and they actually use your products day in and day out. Nobody knows better what to love about your products, and nobody knows better what failures need to be fixed. So why not harness that insight and use it to your advantage?
The tricky part for companies isn't discovering whether such passion for their products exists--if eBay has taught us anything, it's that there are enthusiasts for just about everything--but where those customers can be found.
Business 2.0 was looking forward, speculating on ways companies would locate, communicate with, and co-create with their passionate consumers. That article really got my juices flowing, because I've always been an engaged consumer in search of brands who 'get it'. If I love a brand (Honda an example), I'm happy to tell others why, and even more happy to share ideas and thoughts with the brand ... especially if there's incentive to do so. I was a fan of Open Innovation before I heard those words or knew what they meant. In a nutshell, Open Innovation is looking 'outward' for innovative ideas ... to your customers, clients and employees. Employees, you say, are technically 'on the inside'. But how many companies effectively reach out to employees from top to bottom to tap their collective knowledge? So the act of soliciting ideas from people you'd normally leave out of the equation - whether inside (employee) or outside (consumer/client) - is all part of being 'open for innovation'. And that October, 2005 Business 2.0 article was all about this emerging, disruptive and fatastic trend.
My mind - for better or worse - explodes like a bag of popcorn when I walk into a business, use products, read articles, or - and this is the worse part part - try to sleep at night. "Why don't they do this ...", "what if I came up with a mobile app to connect companies and consumer generated ideas ...", "What if clowns weren't so creepy ...", etc. If you relate, when those idea kernels start bouncing around and filling up your head, you start looking for ways to unload them. Through the years, however, I've encountered plenty of closed doors and few welcome mats whenever I've tried to share or pitch ideas and suggestions. There simply weren't channels in place to do so - in part a problem of technology, and in larger part a problem of close-minded company cultures.
On the technology end, As Web 1.0 fizzled and the seeds of Web 2.0 were being planted, some open-innovative minded outfits began to emerge. Threadless, birthed in 2000, built its entire t-shirt business model around the ideas and choices of its design community. An Inc.com article in June of this year sums up the story of Threadless with the title: The Customer is the Company. Threadless is the epitome of co-creation, where the line between being a consumer and a producer is blurred.
Innocentive emerged on the scene around the same time, offering a global innovation marketplace where companies, or 'seekers', could tap the expertise of tens of thousands of 'solvers', as community members are known. Big players like Proctor and Gamble have used Innocentive for years to try and maintain an innovation edge, meshing Open Innovation into company culture. The upside for Innocentive: it attracts heavy hitter solvers and seekers (rewards range to tens of thousands of dollars for best solutions/ideas). The downside: Innocentive has had trouble extending it's platform beyond the R&D/Engineer/Science crowd.
Over the years, numerous players large and small have entered the Open Innovation arena, including BrightIdea, Mzinga, Imaginatik, Spigit, Salesforce, Kluster, CrowdSpring, UserVoice, GetSatisfaction, SuggestionBox and Fellowforce (I was Director, N. America for Fellowforce for a season). Some have been open for business for a few months, others for a few years. Salesforce powers two of the best known consumer co-creation platforms: Dell's IdeaStorm, and Starbucks' MyStarbucksIdea site.
Wikinomics hit bookstores less than two years ago, and is regarded as the definitive source and guide for all things Open Innovation. The subtitle of the book, How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, sums up the disruptive forces emerging from the empowerment of consumers, and how companies that fail to recognize and act on this shift do so at great risk. The Wikinomics blog is worth adding to your list of preferred reading. We Are Smarter Than Me (How To Unleash The Power of Crowds in Your Business), came out in the past year. We Are Smarter, also with a blog, is more than a book about crowdsourcing; the material in it was gathered through crowdsourcing.
All of this brings us to September 2008. The concept of Open Innovation is still a new one to many, and the education period will continue for some time. But the technology part is, for the most part, solved. There are numerous ways for brands and consumers to connect and communicate and co-create. In fact, I see a new shift underway, one that's meshing a variety of social media channels with more traditional Open Innovation platforms and methods. For instance, Dell has deployed a small army of employees across multiple social media sites to connect with consumers. In addition to its main idea/co-creation hub, IdeaStorm, Dell recently launched a site called DigitalNomads, aimed at "individuals that work or play without regard for their physical location". Digital Nomads was launched in conjuction with a new line of laptops that were designed in part with feedback from the IdeaStorm community. Still with me? And at any given moment, you can find and connect with a Dell employee on Twitter, Facebook or any number of other social networking destinations. Dell understands that at the heart of Open Innovation is communication and conversation. Savvy brands are part of the conversation taking place on hot sites like Twitter each day. Those same brands can use various tools to monitor conversations across the web, so when they're mentioned (good or bad light), they can jump in and respond when able and appropriate.
And that brings me full circle to the main point I want to make. Ultimately, companies have to decide if they want to lower the drawbridge and let consumers and their ideas and suggestions in the door. And they have to decide if they're going to leave the castle and hang out with the people as well. The technology's in place, so there's no excuse there. Solutions vary and can be very affordable, so any size business can decide today that it wants to embrace the social media, open innovation, consumer powered revolution. Twitter and Facebook are free, but time and energy are involved. SuggestionBox.com offers a delightfully simple and buttery smooth feedback management system for about $40 per month (I'm a reseller). And if you need an IdeaStorm-like site, you can choose from offerings from the other companies mentioned (I specialize in a platform called Webforce, from Fellowforce).
I think we're on the verge of a full-on brand stampede into Open Innovation and Social Media engagement with consumers. Every week, every day, I'm finding clues pointing to this being the case. Twitter is simply buzzing with brands now, and this wasn't the case just months ago. Innocentive just announced it received a capital infusion from SAP, and has opened a special SAP Technology and Innovation Pavilion. This should help address the issue I brought up earlier, helping Innocentive branch out into a wider variety of business innovation opportunities for companies and consumers alike. Yesterday, Whole Foods Market announced a website re-design to extend its "interactive relationship online, launching a newly designed Web site that is not only easier to use, but offers new avenues for shoppers to interact transparently with Team Members as they do in the store." And like Dell, you can find Whole Foods chatting away with consumers on Twitter each day, which has become my favorite channel to connect with many brands. And you can't find a major technology event - TechCrunch 50 the latest example - without an Open Innovation company providing a feedback system for the startups and sponsors involved (SuggestionBox.com in this case).
A lot has changed since that Business 2.0 article three years ago. But one question remains, and each business has to ask itself: Are we Open (and willing) for (consumer/employee/client) Innovation?
