As I pointed out in a recent piece in The Economist, companies large and small are luring employees into innovation and ideation exercises built around prediction markets which at times resemble online games. There's more going on in this space than the article allowed to describe, so here is some additional information about interesting players.
Yes, I know, crowdsourcing has become a well-worn buzzword among innovation experts who recommend it as a panacea for all sorts of creative bottlenecks within organizations. Harnessing the so-called "wisdom of the many" allegedly leads to better, faster and more original results than bringing in the consultants. It's a claim that has been hard to prove since it requires tracking a crop of ideas until a few innovations finally show up in the market.
A growing number of companies of various sizes and industries, ranging from postal carriers to big pharmaceutical manufacturers, are now putting the concept of collaborative innovation to the test. They have dumped their quaint suggestion boxes in favor of turnkey solutions for internal crowdsourcing that often resemble online games. Not only does this approach make it easier to engage employees, it is also sitting well with the coming wave of “millennials” entering the workforce – a demographic cohort reared on a diet of social networks, ubiquitous access, and incessant messaging.
California-based Spigit is one such upstart that powers innovation
marketplaces from IBM and Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club to Southwest Airlines. The firm
builds hosted prediction markets where any company can let their staff wager on
promising ideas, and it recently began renting its service through the
on-demand software provider Salesforce.com. Cofounder and CEO Paul Pluschkell told me that employees will submit more ideas, spend more time discussing and
rating them if they are drawn into a game where the individual cubicle dweller
stands to gain reputation and even financial rewards.
The right type of remuneration, however, is a contentious issue among
crowdsourcing proponents. Bring cash into the ideation game, and the social
aspect of collaboration falls victim to fierce competition, according to the
purists. The minds behind the Swiss company Cassiber, for instance, believe
that transparent rankings and leader boards provide plenty of incentives in the
innovation management systems they are running for customers such as Siemens
Building Technologies and supermarket chain Safeway. The key to success, they believe, is an ideally streamlined funnel to let ideas filter up from the staff
to the boss so they can evolve into commercially viable innovations.
Interactive tools, which made their debut on the Web, lead the way in
making crowdsourcing schemes as efficient as possible. New systems such as
Cassiber’s go beyond the common browser form. Employees can text
their suggestions into the digital hopper and even phone in ideas, which a
speech recognition engine then transcribes. It also automatically extracts key
concepts from the submissions and clusters them into related topics, so
managers don’t have to manually go through hundreds of entries and attached
comments. This is no trivial problem as large innovation management systems can
encompass upwards of 150,000 users. Automated sorting and sifting stands to increase
the chances of surfacing valuable ideas, which would otherwise languish in
spreadsheets or other silos.
How then does an enterprise measure whether these ongoing brainstorming exercises are worth the investment or just a time-consuming distraction for its staff? Pfizer’s research and development arm provides one case study. It has been running a crowdsourcing system powered by Imaginatik for its 11,000 scientists since early 2006. The pharmaceutical firm has held 150 idea competitions or “challenges,” which yielded 15,000 tightly focused ideas, the company’s innovation manager Robin Spencer told me. “Ask serious, clear questions in an open, easy-to-use electronic medium, and anyone can and will participate.” The average participation rate of 1-2 percent may sound low, he admits, but the total of 2,900 authors still engaged more sharp minds than any gathering could.
Beyond the plain browser interface for Ph.D.s awaits a whole range of new tools which will make idea generation and innovation management more appealing to the Net generation. The tech consensus is that anyone born after 1980 expects collaborative tools at work to provide suggestions and feedback and to connect across and beyond the company hierarchy.
Imaginatik’s founder Mark Turrell, who has spent the past ten years
refining innovation management systems like the one at Pfizer, believes that
future employees will demand to game an orderly system and that executives
better listen. “They want to be amused and entertained. If a more chaotic
setting makes you money, you should do it.”
There is a catch, though. Companies that want to tap into this creativity have to weigh
communication and interface design expectations from staff in their twenties
against regulations to protect intellectual property, as well as against securities and labor laws or the sensitivities of
participants who want only partial disclosure.
Thanks to new turnkey solutions it looks as if organizations will be able to have it
both ways. For the youthful front-end, they can borrow tools from the world of
games such as infinitely customizable dashboards, earning the next level of
access by slaying an idea challenge, or letting an impromptu expert group take
the shape of a warrior guild. Spigit has already made the leap and lets
customers install leader boards of their most successful idea pickers in the
virtual world of Second Life. It can't be belong before inventive employees
can also earn part of their salary in an "idea world" on the other side of the screen.
