Talk-n-Tweet | Collaborative Innovation at Scale
Previously, I’ve described Why Crowdsourcing Works. Crowdsourcing is a case where you get many people who don’t one another collaborating toward a defined outcome.To reiterate the principle points about the value of crowdsourcing: Diverse inputs drive superior solutions Cognitive diversity requires spanning gaps in social networks Simple enough, yet actually a rich field for work and […]
Harvesting Abundance in the Sharing Economy
The amateurs are coming! Are you ready? Over time, we have seen transitions in how goods and services are supplied to buyers. It used to be that you were limited to what you could buy in your local village. With the rise of industrialization and subsequent globalization, choices increased and costs went down. But inevitably, […]
Avoid these 3 mistakes when asking for employee ideas
Global advisory and research firm Ovum recently forecast 8% annual growth over the next five years for innovation management. Strong momentum, as organizations awake to the cognitive surplus their employees possess. Sadly, some companies launching employee innovation programs will inevitably find the going tough. They’ll launch their innovation initiative with great fanfare. They’ll give themselves the powerful […]
What if customers evaluated your company’s ideas?
At the 2014 HYPE Innovation Managers Forum in Bonn, I hosted a roundtable that looked at Involving Customers in the Innovation Process. There were over a dozen different corporations represented in the discussion. To spur the conversation, I mapped the points for customer involvement as: What customers want (jobs-to-be-done) ideas (open innovation) Feedback on options (collaborative design) As […]
Consultant-Led Innovation
Finally, remember Innovation won’t come from plans or people outside your company – it will be found in the people you already have inside who understand your company’s strengths and its vulnerabilities. Steve Blank, Esade Business School Commencement Speech I think Steve Blank – well-respected thinker on innovation and entrepreneurship – has hit a key point […]
How deep does crowdsourced problem-solving go?
On the recent post, Why crowdsourcing works, Michael Fruhling of BFS Innovations asked: A couple of related questions: for most current crowd sourced problem solving endeavors, how “deep” does the problem solving routinely go? And do the results meaningfully change if incentives are introduced? It was a good, thoughtful question. I answered it in the […]
Why crowdsourcing works
Crowdsourcing is a method of solving problems through the distributed contributions of multiple people. It’s used to address tough problems that happen everyday. Ideas for new opportunities. Ways to solve problems. Uncovering an existing approach that addresses your need. Time and again, crowdsourcing has been used successfully to solve challenges. But…why does it work? What’s […]
An architecture of participation
What happens when half of the world’s population lives in cities? When over three billion people are online? When there are more than 15 billion connected devices?
Old organizational models hit …
Fixing Software Patents, One Hack At Time
Software patents are broken and patent trolls are seriously hurting innovation. Companies are spending more money on buying patents to launch offensive strikes against other companies instead of competing by building great products. There are numerous patent horror stories I could outline where they are being used for all purposes except to innovate. In fact […]
Appirio CloudSpokes – For The Cloud, On The Cloud, By The Cloud (Provider)
Two weeks back, the cloud based systems integrator Appirio announced a new developer community called CloudSpokes. This is an attempt by Appirio to crowdsource cloud development work on public cloud platforms. They already have a good group of developers inside USA and have an offshore partner in India. They are trying to build a community […]
OnCompare: Finally a Service to Help Pick Other Web-based Services (Yes, Yelp +++)
It’s rare I get excited by a new service, but OnCompare has great promise, and if my own experience trying / discarding services is any indication, it serves a real need. Mashable calls is Yelp For Software, not without reason, in fact half a year ago it was just a cry out for help by […]
Model for Employee Innovation: Amazon Prime Case Study
As more organizations expand the innovation mandate throughout their workforce, creating and maintaining an ongoing employee innovation program is critical. Sustainable innovation requires a process, not a haphazard, random luck approach. To that end, a useful model to follow is: The different activities address important aspects of innovation, from eliciting tacit ideas inside people’s heads… Read More
Google To Crowdsource Web Application Security
Google is now trying crowdsource the security researchers from around the world (well, almost as the list doesn’t include countries in the banned list of US government) to find vulnerabilities in the web properties under Google. This is not something new and many providers use this approach to find vulnerabilities in their web applications and […]
The Benefits of Letting Others Recast Your Problem
At the recent Spigit Innovation Summit, MIT professor and leading Enterprise 2.0 thinker Andrew McAfee related the crowdsourcing story of Foldit, about which he also blogged. Foldit is an online game where rank amateurs can try their hand at folding pr…
Crowdsourcing Our New Logo Design. Time to Vote.
We’re putting our money where our (digital) mouth is: having talked so much about crowdsourcing, we took 99designs for a test drive, hoping to see a new CloudAve logo emerge. I was not too impressed with the initial submissions, but just as I sus…
