Perspectives on Innovation

During dinner not long ago, I compared crowdsourcing to the lifelines on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”

Imagine you are sitting in the hot seat.  The show’s host asks you a question.  You are nervous and can’t think straight.  You think you know the answer to the question, but $64,000 is on the line.  You are no longer that sure of yourself.  You have all of your lifelines.  What do you do?

You could of course answer the question on your own.  You answered the previous 10 questions correctly doing it this way.  But the stakes are higher now.  It’s time to get some help.

You could Phone-A-Friend.  Based on the few times I watched the show (admittedly the last time I watched WWTBAM was back in 2001 when was living in England), this option rarely proved reliable.  Of course, if your friend has access to Google and can search quickly, then it is probably the best option.

You could go for the 50/50.  Here, two incorrect answers are eliminated, leaving you only two choices.  This is a great option.  Unfortunately, according to the all-knowing Wikipedia, “the answers eliminated were not random but were pre-selected as the ones the contestant was least likely to pick.”  Well, that makes things a bit harder.

Finally, you could Ask the Audience.  The audience seemed to be nearly always right.  According to Wikipedia, “This is a popular lifeline, known for its near-perfect accuracy. (Regis) Philbin once said that the audience’s answer is statistically 95% of the time correct.”  However, my research shows that this accuracy level is only for the first 10 questions.  For the more difficult questions, I believe that they are often clueless.  Now, if only those who really knew the answer responded, then I suspect the audience could be even more accurate.

In the current version of the show, there are other lifelines, like “Ask the Expert.”  You can guess what this is.

Now, imagine you are in the hot seat at work.  You are working on a pressing challenge.   You think you know the answer.  Or maybe you haven’t a clue how to solve it.  Regardless, how do you want to bet the company’s money?

You could Phone-A-Friend.  That is, you could ask the people around your desk at work.  This would most likely improve your chances.  Sadly, as great as Google is, it will not provide the answers to your more difficult challenges.

You could do the equivalent of “asking the audience” by asking customers for feedback.  MyStarbucksIdea simulates this concept.  Unfortunately, as with the WWTBAM audience, you get a lot of “noise” in the responses because everyone wants to be heard.

You could Ask the Expert.  To do this you might partner with a University or bring on a consultant.    Or maybe you outsource the challenge to a 3^rd party to take responsibility for solving the problem.

Or maybe there is a solution that combines several of these together.  Call it the “Ask the Audience of Experts.”  This might involve posing a challenge to a group of highly skilled experts; people who have a higher likelihood of solving your problems.  You get the viewpoint of many people (much better than Phone-A-Friend), but you also eliminate the “noise” associated with a generic audience.  This gives you the added bonus of having a “50/50″ solution set because you end up with fewer “wrong” answers.

As far as I know, no one has ever won the million dollars on the TV show without using their lifelines.  Why should your organization try to win its millions without using the best lifelines available to you?

In this segment of his Big Think interview, Dwayne discusses the InnoCentive style of innovation, which allows companies to change the question from “how do I manage a global workforce?” to “how can I get everyone in the world who is capable, ready, willing and able to work on my problem, to actually work on it?” and only pay for success.

In this segment of his Big Think interview, Dwayne tells the story of the Oil Spill Recovery Institute (OSRI), which faced the challenge of removing viscous oil from the bottom of Prince William Sound after the the Exxon Valdez oil spill. After 20 years of trying to solve this problem, they turned to InnoCentive and received a solution from an InnoCentive Solver who had no background in the oil and gas industry.  This story illustrates the power of diversity and the effectiveness of tapping into a pool outside of your own experts.

I recently learned about a very interesting and ambitious crowdsourcing project called “Star Wars Uncut”.  The goal of the project is to create a user-generated version of the movie Star Wars.  Readers are invited to pick a 15-second scene from the movie, recreate it and send it back to the organizers, who will assemble all of the scenes into a full length recreation of the movie.  The rules are simple – only original videos will be accepted, no music, video must be complete within 30 days and comply with specific formatting and timing guidelines.   The project got so much positive word of mouth publicity that all of the scenes were claimed within 4 days. 

Suspecting that this might be of interest to our Solver demographic, I asked the organizer, Casey Pugh, to provide a bit more information about the project. 

Hi Casey - can you tell us how this project came about?

Sure!  I work at Vimeo, so I’m very familiar with internet video. We have always been thinking about ways to improve our forums and user collaborations. I thought it’d be great if users could collaborate easier on video projects by tasking out jobs like, directing, animating, shooting, etc. I used Star Wars as an example project that people would collaborate on.

Eventually the idea turned into something even simpler; slice the movie into pieces and have each user pick a piece. My first reaction to it was, “woh! that would be pretty fun and hilarious”. I got the idea at least six months ago. Then one day I realized I should just make my own site that uses Vimeo as the medium. This project wasn’t made for Vimeo, it’s just a coincidence that I work there. Anyone can use Vimeo as a crowd-sourcing platform using Vimeo’s API. I hope my site will give some crowdsourcing inspiration to another geek out there.

After only four days all of the scenes were taken – did you have any idea the idea would be so popular?

No idea – the initial release of Star Wars: Uncut was to test the waters to see the level interest from the internet community.  I’m thrilled by the amount of attention it has received and by the pure excitement everyone has to get involved.

What will you do about people who still want to participate but missed their chance to grab one of the available scenes?

This weekend, I will be releasing an upgraded version of Star Wars: Uncut. It will allow a lot more people to join in on the fun. This means there will be multiple versions of each scene where fans will be able to choose their favorite version. Just imagine being able to watch Star Wars a completely different way every time you watch it. I can’t wait.  I’ll spare you the techinical details of how it will work right now, but I would like people to know that they still have a chance to participate!
 
Will you publish more contests like these?

I would like to do the next two Star Wars movies if this one goes well.  I’m very excited about it all and I hope Mr. Lucas won’t be upset about our awesome tribute.

Thanks Casey, and good luck!

Thanks!

Renowned innovation expert Steve Shapiro has recently joined InnoCentive as VP of Strategic Consulting.

On July 1, 2009, I joined InnoCentive as the “VP of Strategic Consulting and Chief Innovation Evangelist.”  Although I just joined the company, for several years now, I have marveled at how the InnoCentive Solver community could tackle problems that have plagued businesses and society for years.  You are changing the world.  And I am thrilled to now be part of your team.

As I followed InnoCentive and observed the success of the Solver community, it got me thinking about how problems are solved.

From my research on innovation personality styles, I have observed that there are two broad ways of solving challenges: relational/creative and rational/analytical.

Steve Jobs, President of Apple Inc, once said, “Creativity is just having enough dots to connect . . . connect experiences and synthesize new things. The reason creative people are able to do that is that they’ve had more experiences or have thought more about their experiences than other people.”  This beautifully articulates how creative/relational problem solving works.

To date, most InnoCentive Challenges have been more technical in nature and are typically solved through a more rational/analytical approach.

When looking at these two styles, I realized that InnoCentive Solvers are perfectly positioned to use BOTH innovation styles.  To explain why I believe this, let’s explore what happens in the brain when solving Challenges. (more…)