In a recent chat with a crowdsourcing-knowledgeable innovator within a large enterprise, he shared good honest dialog about the open innovation benefits he’s seen in his organization, and also the challenges he faces. The two biggest challenges he mentioned are: 1) getting other organizations inside the enterprise to embrace the concept of open innovation and get engaged, and 2) dealing with the resistance in the legal department in their organization.
These are common issues that we hear about frequently from innovation champions, and these issues beg the larger question: How do you get rolling with open innovation in a large organization given the resistance?
I’m going to wager that if you have “innovation” in your title and you are in a larger enterprise, you have been contemplating just this question (and facing these challenges). You’re not alone.
Start off with the right mindset: Think of your initial crowdsourcing project(s) not so much as ones that will drive that “breakthrough idea” but more to build the proof-points on which you can build. You want to be as sure as you can that your initial crowdsourcing projects are successful, and it helps you to build that internal support you need to share the benefits of crowdsourcing enterprise-wide. So how do you stack the deck in your favor?
Here is some guidance we often give to our clients and prospective clients with regards to their initial open innovation projects:
Start small
One of the major sources of resistance to open innovation inside of an enterprise is that it’s unknown. People don’t understand the open innovation process, and they don’t know what to expect from it. So, to reduce that concern, start small. For your first crowdsourcing initiative shoot for 300 – 500 participants, over a limited time period of maybe one to two months. One of the things we’ve learned over the past five years is that you can drive great results from a small but engaged crowd. In fact, if done correctly the quality of the results would be difficult to surpass even with a much larger crowd. More ideas aren’t always better. Smaller crowds are easier to recruit, easier to motivate and easier to moderate, and will often display much higher than average participation levels.
Start simple
There are likely all sorts of potential applications for crowdsourcing and open innovation within your organization. Some of which might involve solving complex problems that you’ve been having trouble with; problems that may be preventing business growth. So the potential payout is high. But these types of open innovation challenges often have a lower success rate, and can require some specific expertise on the part of the crowd. They are still worth doing, but not as your first open innovation challenge. Rather think of challenges that have a much higher rate of success – such as challenges to enhance current products or services, improve business operations, or identify new business models, for example. For each of these, a well-designed and executed challenge is almost guaranteed to yield valuable results, and provide the proof point you need.
Start Inside
As we’ve noted in past posts, crowds almost always behave very well in a crowdsourcing site, and respect IP and legal terms (we have yet to hear a report of a “stolen idea”). Yet, we understand legal departments tend to worry about protection of IP and difficulties in transferring IP created to the company. So we suggest you start “safe” by reaching out to an internal crowd. Your company presumably has an existing relationship regarding IP ownership with your employees, and this can be reinforced with the terms of the challenge engagement itself. While the IP relationship with external crowds is well understood at this point and the legal worry isn’t really justified, it’s usually much easier to get legal to bless an initial project with a “safe” internal crowd. Plus you get the added benefits that internal crowds often participate at even higher rates and you’ll build internal goodwill by allowing wider employee participation in something of meaning to the company.
Since you’ll be learning a lot from your first open innovation project as well, keeping it small, simple and inside means that you have to worry less about the project and can focus more on enhancing your own experience and expertise. If you’ve followed Chaordix for a while, you know that another thing we’re fond of saying is “We make crowdsourcing simple”, and we mean what we say. What ideas do you have for first steps with open innovation in 2011?