Innovation @ Work -- It's All a Game!

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.

Comments

[pernille tranberg]

yes a brilliant piece. cheers pernille

[Zuleika]

Keep up the good work.