New advances in collaborative technologies, often grouped under the umbrella term „web 2.0‟, are changing the opportunity space for organisational collaboration and decision making. Research and development can now be outsourced to external self-organising communities of scientists E.g. Proctor and Gamble‟s As documented for example in Burgess et al (2009) and Herz (2005). For example sites such as
This paper examines recent changes to the innovation process and the advent of so-called
It is sometimes tempting to view the contemporary popularity of the concept of innovation as merely the product of fashions and fads in the policy and business school literatures. From the perspective of economics, however, it has long been recognised that innovation is a real and powerfully generative force in the growth and development of economic systems An excellent overview is provided in Nelson (1996). For example Lundvall (1992), OECD (1997) and Nelson and Sampat (2001). Innovation systems can generically be defined as the set of institutions and actors that contribute to the creation of new knowledge and its application, including firms, universities and government agencies (Metcalfe 2007).
This shift is being driven by a deeper recognition that organisations in the market sector face an unambiguous selection pressure to innovate as a form of competition, while also needing to co-operate with other firms and actors outside organisational boundaries, such as partners, suppliers and customers. Innovation, in other words, „ultimately operates at the level of people, firms and networks of firms learning to do new things‟, and that organisations, from this perspective, „are simultaneously competitive and cooperative systems‟
Focusing the lens at the level of the organisation, rather than at the level of the economic system as a whole, emphasises that innovation is a process that firms undertake, whether consciously or not. It involves decisions regarding allocation of capital, what constitutes an acceptable level of risk, setting and modifying strategic direction, and co-ordination of the internal and external resources needed to attain concrete goals The innovation process is thus part of the
At any given moment in the unfolding of economic evolution, a particular set of activities and decision-making principles will constitute so-called „best practice‟ in the execution of the innovation process at the organisational level. The changes in what constitutes best practice in the innovation process have been mapped in a generational model that reflects ongoing variations in market and technological conditions, and the strategies that have emerged in response to these changes.
Five broad „generations‟ of the innovation process have been identified, charting a shift from more closed, linear forms of innovation to more open, complex and network-based processes. These generations are summarised in Table 1 below.
Five identified generations of the innovation process at the organisational level Adapted from Dodgson et al (2008)
Generation | Description |
---|---|
1st: Supply push | Science → Technology → Applications by firms to market |
2nd: Market pull | Market demand → R&D → technology & manufacture → sales |
3rd: Coupling model | Science and technology → interactions between R&D, design, operations, marketing, etc (all within the firm) → Markets |
4th: Collaborative model | Science and technology → interactions between R&D, design, operations, marketing, etc (collaboration with customers, suppliers, research alliances) → Markets |
5th: Strategic, integrated & open | Systematic interactions with all sources of knowledge |
It is not the case that all organisations with a capacity for innovation are necessarily operating at the „frontier‟ represented by the fifth generation model; there are differences across sectors, geographies, size of firm and the extent to which market selection pressures are in effect
Fifth generation innovation is characterised by a number of key attributes as summarised in Table 2:
Key attributes of fifth generation innovation Adapted from Potts and Morrison (2009)
Attribute of fifth generation innovation | Examples |
---|---|
Innovation technologies | Multi‐agent simulations of new product uptake, visualisation and virtual world technologies, rapid prototyping |
Business networks | Consortia and joint venture formation, social and professional networks, „co-opetition‟ |
Multiple sources of ideas/novelty | Increasing importance of lead users and beta testing, marketing focus on bidirectional dialogue, rise of consumer co‐creation |
Role of brokers | Innovation marketplaces e.g. yet2.com, nine sigma, innocentive and commercial value of brokering e.g. Innovation Xchange |
Importance of flexible business models | Value realization through connecting assets and knowledge |
The focus here is on the first attribute of fifth generation innovation as tabled above: innovation technologies (known as IvTs). While there is a growing literature on the role and importance of these technologies in fifth generation innovation For example Dodgson et al (2005)
The argument being put forward here is that this emphasis misses an important class of innovation technologies related to idea generation and development; what may be called
Ideation mechanisms as a class of innovation technologies also impact other dimensions of fifth generation innovation. Multiple sources of ideas and novelty are clearly strengthened by the use of techniques that broaden the base from which ideas are sought, and the composition of business networks may be altered at the individual level through cross-organisational participation in ideation activities. It is thus useful to describe one particular approach to ideation – known as a
A jam is a time-limited, online collaboration event, held on the web, which allows a defined group of participants to post ideas, and discuss and vote on ideas, in response to a particular challenge or issue. The jam‟s focus on a specific problem or question avoids open-ended web-based discussions in which no clear outcomes are achieved. Instead, the jam process is effective because it is:
It is increasingly recognised that the standard techniques of brainstorming - asking people to attend a meeting to share their ideas in a workshop or focus group format – are severely limited in effectiveness, in terms of both the quality and number of ideas generated, and individual‟s experience of the process Duggan, W. (2007)
Also known as „challenges‟ or „collaboration events‟, jams are a form of ideation technology differentiated by the fact that they are limited in time. They provide a new form of collaboration that avoids many of the limitations of traditional face-to-face brainstorming techniques. In particular, the format allows participants to deeply engage with the challenge over an extended timeframe, avoiding the artificial time pressure that can lead to ineffective brainstorming sessions. In addition, the online format provides a neutral space in which all personality types can voice their opinion with equal impact. Finally, three distinct mechanisms of contribution or „voice‟ are provided by the jam: posting new ideas, commenting on the ideas of others or simply voting to assign an idea a positive ('thumbs up') or negative ('thumbs down') response.
IBM has been a pioneer in the development of the jam approach, running regular jam-based events since 2001 Summarised from Bjelland and Wood (2008)
Pfizer is another organisation that is relatively mature in its deployment of the jam or challenge-led approach to innovation. In the three years to 2008, it has run over 150 collaboration events involving both internal and external participants, as part of a broader strategy to implement a large number of small and mid-size innovation projects rather than one big, highly resourced and risky innovation initiative. Rob Spencer, Pfizer‟s Senior Research Fellow for Idea Management and Innovation, states
When the business environment is known, predictable, controllable, it is appropriate to “push” resources at problems. However, when the environment is uncertain, complex, and not fully controllable, it is better to “pull” resources to problems in a just-in-time fashion. The difficulties lie in the details of such a rapid, flexible, unstructured approach …In the past three years, Pfizer Global Research & Development has run over 150 structured and documented problem-solving challenges, both inside and outside the firewall.
Pfizer‟s challenges relate to a range of different topics including technically difficult scientific problems, solving coordination and implementation issues, continuous improvement opportunities and challenges specifically made to external parties, with five „open innovation‟ communities (mainly comprising people from outside Pfizer) actively engaged in the overall challenge-led process. Pfizer now maintains a small, dedicated team of around four full time equivalent staff to help identify, deploy, manage and analyse outputs from the near-continuous stream of collaborative innovation events. All of Pfizer‟s so-called knowledge workers (numbering approximately 30,000) are enabled to participate in challenges and event sizes range from senior management groups of around a dozen through to mass engagement events involving up to 10,000 participants.
Both IBM and Pfizer are examples of large, global corporates adopting a purposefully collaborative method for organising innovation activities around specific challenges or problems. Mid- and smaller sized organisations are also starting to experiment with the jam approach, including privately held firms limited to operations on a single continent and nonprofit and academic entities with geographically dispersed stakeholders.
Regardless of the size or sector of the organisation trying out the challenge-led approach, there appear to be a small number of attributes linked to the successful execution of the process This assertion is based on the author‟s professional experience in assisting small- and mid-sized organisations with trialling challenge-led innovation. This is especially the case as the evolution from proprietary to open source software shifts the value proposition for applications from ownership of code to effectiveness of functionality.
Identification of the appropriate jam sponsor to ensure commitment to action as a result of the jam event;
Engagement with the nominated jam sponsor to define the challenge in a way that will be meaningful to the participants;
Assistance with identification of the appropriate participant group;
Advice on selection of the appropriate event duration;
Advice on anonymity conditions (it is possible to hold some jams with complete anonymity of all participants if required);
Development of a communications plan and identification of appropriate social events and/or prizes, both to optimise participant engagement;
Intervention in the jam to resolve disputes with fact-based research and/or redirect the discussion along more productive lines (in conjunction with the jam sponsor);
Evaluation of the jam data and preparation of a „jam results‟ report, including statistics on posting, voting and commenting patterns and analysis of the most popular, active and controversial ideas;
These services, along with a robust and reliable technology platform, are clearly essential to the successful execution of a single challenge or jam event. They do not, however, ensure that the outputs of such an event are translated into realistic and prioritised actions that will be incorporated into the higher-level decision making process of the organisation in question.
For most organisations, it will not be economic to create an internal capability in facilitating and managing challenge-led innovation in the manner of IBM and Pfizer. It is therefore instructive to examine the interface by which ideas and opinions from ideation mechanisms such as jam events are taken into account in broader organisational decision making.
While many organisations maintain and continually refine a clearly-articulated strategic planning and decision-making routine, the limits of scale and availability of resources often mean that such processes in small- and mid-size organisations are under-resourced and ad hoc.
As the discussion above highlights, a collaborative method such as the jam allow employees to potentially become An authoritative overview is provided in Hartley (2009), with platform-specific examples documented in Burgess et al (2009) and Herz (2005).
This shift from
Concurrently, the role of open innovation practices – bringing knowledge and expertise from outside the organisation to bear on internal challenges and problems – is becoming better understood and more commonly applied as a form of competition
All of these dynamics suggest that any initiative to harness the co-created, socially-mediated, bottom-up world of web 2.0 can only auger well for the productivity, competitiveness and long-term performance of modern organisations.
Yet an inevitable tension remains because we are dealing with these bottom-up collaboration processes in the context of an
The primary recognition must be that bottom-up processes of collaboration and ideation do not negate the need for some form of strategy formation and executive decision making – while the inputs to the decision making process may have changed, the need for decisions to be taken from a strategic perspective remains. The key now is that a much richer set of inputs needs to be considered. Further, the extent to which these new inputs are truly useful will depend strongly on the framing of the initial jam question or challenge – highlighting that this is a process which requires beginning with the end in mind.
Apart from careful specification of the purpose or problem for which an ideation technology is to be used, it is imperative that a commitment to take action as a result of the process is secured up-front. Even before a jam event is held, organisational leaders must commit to responding to the ideas and opinions generated, and reporting back to the participant group on the nature of that response once the event has ended. Securing this commitment is assisted by identifying a particular individual as the „jam sponsor‟ – typically the role with the greatest strategic interest in the outcomes of the event.
These two principles appear to be common success factors for ideation processes generally. They may be thought of as the basic conditions for the Cohen and Levinthal (1989 and 1990) first put forward the concept of absorptive capacity as the ability of a firm to value, assimilate and apply new knowledge, and conjectured that the research and development function of an organisation not only provided new ideas and knowledge but also ensured that the organisation is able to take-up and make use of knowledge and ideas from outside (this argument is known as „the two faces of R&D‟). Development of analogous proxies for absorptive capacity related to knowledge created through ideation technologies requires further research.
Regarding the need for a strong strategic perspective to define a clearly articulated challenge, the jam provides a clear advantage over other ideation techniques because it is designed from first principles to be focused around a particular challenge, rather than the „black hole‟ of a suggestion box or the open-ended conversation of a blog or community discussion;
Regarding the second common success factor – the need for a commitment for action to be taken as a result of the ideation process and for this to be communicated to participants in a meaningful fashion: the advantage offered by the jam approach derives from the fact that it is time-limited; the start and end points can be used as focal points around which sponsor engagement and participant communication can be organised. In addition, the finite nature of the jam event means that different sponsors can be secured for different jams, depending on the nature of the challenge being addressed; this avoids the inappropriate assignment of one individual in taking strategic responsibility for all web 2.0 or ideation activities.
Apart from these two common success factors, it would appear that other attributes required for development of an effective interface between ideas and opinions from ideation mechanisms, on the one hand, and broader organisational decision making, on the other, are specific to the nature and context of the organisation itself.
For organisations to truly take advantage of the potential benefits of co-created strategy through ideation technologies, a number of other factors will thus need to be considered on a case-by-case basis:
The Lurker: an individual who on average views more content than he contributes;
The Heckler: an individual who primarily comments on ideas compared to expressing a definitive idea by voting;
The Democrat: an individual who uses voting as their primary form of expression;
The Cheerleader: an individual who votes positively for more ideas than is predicted by the average voting profile for the group (potentially offset by The Naysayer who votes in the opposite direction);
The Populist: an individual who (knowingly or not) generates ideas that are disproportionately popular;
The Parachuter: an individual who submits only one idea and does not comment or vote on any other;
The Provocateur: an individual who is associated with high levels of activity (in the form of both positive and negative votes as well as comments) rather than straight popularity.
It may be useful to understand the distribution of these participation styles within an organisation as ideation through jamming becomes embedded as part of the broader innovation process.
Additional research is needed to explore the specific relationships between organisational parameters, collaborative processes and ideation outcomes suggested by these observations. This further work should assist in improving understanding of how to create the most value from jams and other ideation technologies, and assessing how and where the full benefits of co-created strategy may be realised.