Perspectives on Innovation

You know crowdsourcing has become mainstream when it is leveraged as a primary tool for selecting sessions and panels at an event/conference. Next year’s South by Southwest (SWSX) conference, an immensely popular event taking place in Austin Texas, features a “panel picker” that enables the crowd to cast a vote for the sessions they would like to see.

We’d like to engage our crowd to vote for a panel featuring the CEOs of  TopCoder and InnoCentive, Jack Hughes and Dwayne Spradlin, along with Jake Ward of Popular Science who will be moderating the panel.

The proposed panel, titled “Open Innovation: Millions of Us Solving Problems,” will discuss how open innovation and crowdsourcing can transform organizations, either through a breakthrough ‘eureka‘ idea or continuous and incremental improvement of a product or service. The panel will discuss what companies from Netflix to NASA to Toyota have gained from putting their biggest Challenges out in front of the general public, and how attendees can do the same. It will also uncover the key issues organizations need to address when incorporating open innovation communities into their own business plans, and how professional problem-solving communities will evolve in the coming years.

Please take a moment to register and vote!

By the way, as I was reading some of the comments on the registration page, I ran across this one from someone named John: “Interesting…crowd-sourced panel picking for a session on open innovation and crowdsourcing. Pretty appropriate I must say.”

We couldn’t agree more John.

Last week, InnoCentive’s CEO Dwayne Spradlin participated in an event sponsored by Crowdsortium at the Microsoft New England Research & Development Center (NERD) in Cambridge MA. Crowdsortium bills itself as “a group of crowdsourcing industry practitioners that have self-organized to advance the crowdsourcing industry through best practices, education, data collection and public dialog.”

To a packed audience, Harvard Professor Karim Lakhani delivered a compelling keynote speech on the history and future of crowdsourcing, followed by a panel which included Dwayne, Jeff Howe (who was widely credited with inventing the term “crowdsourcing”), Doron Reuveni (CEO of uTest), and Daniel Sullivan (President of Appswell). Jim Savage, a partner at Longworth Venture Partners, moderated the panel.

The folks at uTest have kindly posted the videos online. Click on a link to view:

     * Keynote: Accessing the Ideas Cloud via Crowdsourcing

     * Panel, part 1: Crowdsourcing Defined

     * Panel, part 2: The Crowdsourcing Business Model & Sweet Spots

     * Panel, part 3: Managing the Crowd & Crowdsourcing Challenges

Many thanks to the Crowdsortium team, as well as the sponsors – Appswell and uTest – for putting on a great event. The InnoCentive team looks foward to participating in future events.

InnoCentive hosted a webinar featuring our very own Dwayne Spradlin and Alph Bingham, co-authors of the recently published book, The Open Innovation Marketplace: Creating Value in the Challenge Driven Enterprise.

To view a replay of the webinar, please click here. And to download a chapter of the book, click here.

During this live event, which gathered hundreds of participants from Fortune 500 enterprises, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations, Dwayne and Alph discussed what motivated them to write the book, the importance of Challenge Driven Innovation (CDI) and other key open innovation principles, real-world case studies of CDI in action, and how companies can evolve into true Challenge Driven Enterprises.

Audience Polling Results

We asked several polling questions of the audience during the event. Here’s a snapshot of the questions and the participants’ answers:

What are the biggest innovation challenges you face today? (check all)

43% – Measuring the success of your innovation efforts

41% – Time-to-market with new products

33% – Lack of funding and resources

30% – Balancing risk and reward

15% – Increasing cost with diminishing returns

Analysis: Unsurprisingly, time-to-market was a top answer. Yet innovation measurement trumped time-to-market, which is indicative of the difficulty companies face in measuring the success of their various initiatives. Alph dives deeper into this topic in his blog post. (more…)

HP recently released a news advisory highlighting the results of a fascinating innovation survey that the company commissioned. (The global survey included interviews with 312 executives in both commercial enterprises and the public sector during February and March 2011).

Some of the report highlights include:

1. Ninety-eight (98) percent of the executives surveyed believe that innovation will be critical to the success of their organizations over the next five years.
2. The most important reason to innovate is to facilitate future organizational growth (79% of respondents). For commercial enterprises, the second most important reason to innovate is to support profitability (74% of respondents); for the public sector, reputation is the second most important reason to innovate (59% of respondents). InnoCentive’s work with public sector organizations (e.g., Air Force Research Labs, NASA, In-Q-Tel and the intelligence community) in particular reveals that they are serious about finding solutions to problems that matter most to their missions, advocating public-private partnerships, and promoting transparency, openness, and collaboration across agencies.
3. Thirty-five (35) percent of organizations do not appear capable of measuring the success of their innovation efforts. This number is somewhat troubling and is probably low. Establishing a measurement framework with feedback loops and regular milestone checks should be a key deliverable for all open innovation programs and projects.
4. The majority of executives interviewed believe that they are innovation leaders in their respective industries, with 74% of CEOs indicating said leadership. Since the majority of respondents also indicated that CEOs are most responsible for guiding innovation efforts, it’s not surprising that the majority of CEOs self-report leadership.
5. Inadequate funding and technology were recognized as significant barriers to innovation. I’ll go ahead and add a few one more: A lack of methodology, process, discipline, and expertise. InnoCentive’s unique methodology, Challenge Driven Innovation, is an innovation framework that accelerates traditional innovation outcomes by leveraging open innovation and crowdsourcing along with defined methodology, process, and tools to help organizations develop and implement actionable solutions to their key problems, opportunities, and challenges. The key point is: Methodology matters.

Overall, some thought-provoking data courtesy of HP.

Coming off the heels of The Economist’s Ideas Economy: Human Potential conference in September 2010, the InnoCentive team once again joined The Economist in New York City, this time for a standing room only event focused on Intelligent Infrastructure. This event convened some of the world’s top minds for captivating discussions on energy, architecture, information, transportation, finance, and cities of the future.

The meeting was once again emceed by the charismatic Vijay Vaitheeswaran, global correspondent for The Economist. Among the notable speakers were our very own Dwayne Spradlin, president and CEO of InnoCentive, and our client Judith Rodin, president of The Rockefeller Foundation. Judith was kind enough to give a big shout out to InnoCentive during her segment (InnoCentive has partnered with the foundation on 10 challenges, attracting more than 5,500 Solvers and 500 solution submissions with an 80% success rate). (more…)