“Our model at Method is that being weird and different is good. Weird changes the world, and Detroit could use a little more of weird in terms of creative ideas.”

- Eric Ryan, Method Products Co-Founder (AdAge)

I’ve been into the idea of weird lately. It feels like odd and peculiar themes are increasingly breaking through and holding the public’s attention. Somehow, today’s world of endless choice still offers us an oversupply of sameness; so we’re almost begging for non-conformity. If you look to popular culture, the not-so-weak signals are everywhere. Austin’s “Keep [City] Weird” support-local movement is spreading across the US.  The world’s number one pop artist wears clothing made of meat. The LA Lakers’ starting Small Forward is changing his name to Meta World Peace. It seems the novelty of of the unconventional is pushing us to the edges of our relative notions of comfort. And we are liking it.

Unlikely friends have benefits.

One of my more specific interests around weirdness is the uncharted space that odd combinations can lead us to. I realize cultural mash-ups are not a new idea. And yes, they can be excruciatingly bad (think Rap-Rock). But they can also be hugely interesting, inventive and inspiring.

Artists, of course, have been fearlessly blending ideas for centuries. But in the business world we seem more hesitant to look beyond category borders for experimentation and learning. The recent emphasis on Design Thinking and Innovation has more key players preaching the merits of cross-disciplinary collaboration, but in practice this approach is still barely visible.

Recently I stumbled upon Grant McCracken’s Culturematic posts proposing the need for more culture-smashing tools. I think we’re likely to see an explosion of similar Oblique Strategies over the next few years. You can only imagine the fruits of a Large Hadron Cultural Collider. Or an event series that promotes weird cross-industry collaborations like Food & Psychology or Comedy & Finance (call it Funny Money).

A weird little brand case.

One of my favorite new local brands is a microbrew out of Barrie, Ontario. Flying Monkey produces a roster of delicious craft brews like Hoptical Illusion and Netherworld Cascadian Dark. The brand is not just a nod to oddity, it’s built on the idea. Their tagline “normal is weird” is a pledge to the peculiar, and everything they do serves to honour that pledge. The glassware, for example, is littered with little bits of unusual magic like the “Reorder Line” (photo below). The brand purpose extends to its people as well, as is evident in this excerpt from an article on a hot new little Toronto snack spot:

“Peter Aitchison, a salesman with Flying Monkeys Craft Brewery in Barrie, told us that he could sculpt anything. So we said, ‘OK, let’s see you make a draft tap out of a telephone pole.’ And he did, over a span of 12 hours with a chisel.”

Their website also keeps it surreal. Upon arrival you’re unsure if you’ve landed on the brewery’s mainpage or if you’re embarking on a journey to the fantastical underground of the early internets.

Things could (and should) get weird.

The Age of Weird is arriving. The business world is already playing catch-up. We know creative advantage is more crucial now than ever before. Firms willing to move beyond their core comforts, embrace their cultural quirks, and experiment on the fringes will be best positioned for innovation. Yes, this will be a difficult transition for many. But it also promises to be fun, enlightening, and potentially lucrative for those wiling to get a little freaky.

Stay tuned for some IC weird-play in the coming months.

The last three weeks have been a whirlwind of workshops and social innovation. A speaking engagement at the 3P conference in Kitchener had me talking to technologists, business leaders and academics about how to use Design Thinking to make social change. A week of planning sessions in Montreal was about designing extended social programs for people with chronic illness. A productive few days in DC with the World Bank had us working on distributed innovation experiences for offices around the world.

I’ll be honest. I’m exhausted. But when you’re talking about innovation change, it’s hard not to focus on the greater good.

These days, there’s a lot of interest in Idea Couture’s social innovation practice. Much like design thinking, any new and fuzzily-defined term that enters the business world is at least partly cause for buzz. But on the plus side, I know that the majority of the interest is based on the opportunity that Social Innovation presents.

This isn’t CSR. This is business. It’s making money by doing good. And it works.

From pharmaceutical companies who know that their social impact will lead to financial impact, to technologists who are looking for new learning opportunities that extend their definition of value through solving problems of social change, these last few weeks have shown me that the social innovation world is alive. The great Peter Drucker said that, “Every single social and global issue of our day is a business opportunity in disguise”. It seems as though the business world is starting to catch on.

Three years ago, I sat down with a good friend from MaRS to talk about his experience working with not for profits. At the time, I had been hitting a wall doing some business model design work for a now-defunct not for profit. To this day, I’ll remember that conversation as a turning point in my career. “The problem with so many of these (not-for-profits) is that they’re completely afraid of money,” he said. Over the next few years, I’ve grown to understand what he meant.

It’s not necessarily a fear of income – very few organizations have the ability to raise funds like a well run not-for-profit. But for some reason, the dialogue of multiple winners from a giving scenario seems to make many not-for-profit’s uneasy. But whenever a problem is solved, new value is created, and in many cases, that value is being left on the table.

Thankfully, with the number of social-entrepreneurs that I’ve met since that fateful conversation, both through our incubation experience and through talks at a number of universities, a shift is on its way. It seems as though many people realize that one possible future of giving is to also get, be it through new organizational experience, new revenue streams, or reduced operational costs. With benefits like that, it’s no wonder there’s buzz.

The shame of making money through solving real social problems is on its way out the door.

Read any CSR book, and it will tell you that companies will eventually change – not out of the kindness of their hearts, but because their customers are demanding it. While this is certainly true (our design research constantly confirms that customers are asking for social-embedded products and services), I’m now seeing a lot of companies that are shifting based primarily on operational benefits. That puts a smile on my face because the social innovation mandate is coming from both the top down and the bottom up.

I’ll make this very clear – for Idea Couture, Social Innovation means using social impact as a business strategy. It’s about creating real, tangible value for organizations through tackling social problems with ties to their core business model. The expectations are high, both in terms of financial impact, but also delivering results on social impact.

Social innovation is the future of business. It’s hard not to read that and feel a little more optimistic about what’s to come.

Idea Couture has its roots in digital innovation. Frog, Adaptive Path, my good friends at Normative Design, and many other leading innovation firms also have amazingly strong foundations in the digital world. Three years ago, I left the interactive industry to pursue innovation consulting, and while I expected a painful transition, what I found was that infusing big problems with the sensibilities of the interactive space, no problem is insurmountable. Now, all of these firms call upon that experience to tackle problems much larger than designing websites.

I believe that interactive people are the world’s best innovators.

While today, the process of innovation is often labeled “design thinking”, people from the interactive space don’t really need to call it anything other than their job. The process of innovation has been intuitively embedded in user experience since people first started thinking about how websites work. What’s even more incredible is that the interactive space has only reached one billionth of its potential. While we draw on foundations of industrial design and architecture, we’re blazing trails in other unexplored territory.

Digital people are inventors

In a typical design process, defining constraints of a project is one of the very earliest steps. In the interactive realm, a constraint is treated like an opportunity to push the boundaries of a medium. As a result, people are more than willing to hack the rules or create new rules to make the optimal solution work. Their analytical yet lateral ability to solve problems is second to none. Interactive people are inventors.

Interactive people understand systems

Anyone who grew up in a web firm lived the life of the ugly stepchild. If you were building websites in the early 2000′s, you knew that your entire existence hinged on an appreciation of multiple service and experience paths. You were building within a larger organizational system and context – you were one piece of a puzzle. Interactive people are systems designers.

Empathy is at the core of innovation

A web design process is inherently user centred. It requires an in depth understanding of a person’s goals, and your job is to help them achieve those goals. That being said, interactive people understand that an end user’s experience is a reflection of both what you design and their own environment on the other side of the screen. We deal with issues of accessibility, issues of screen size, mobile considerations, situated experience, and more. Interactive people understand user centred design.

Digital people communicate

Since the beginning of my web career, I’ve understood design thinking tools. Prototyping, wireframing and storyboarding are all essential processes in the digital space. Apply those same skills to a service design problem, or to a product design problem, and suddenly abstract concepts make complete sense to your clients. Interactive people apply the design thinking toolkit every day.

Digital people understand performance

One of the largest barriers to innovation is the burden of proof. Since the very beginning of the digital era, people have been measuring websites to communicate the success of innovation, and drawing relevant parallels where no previous parallels existed. Digital people balance business and user objectives.

Interactive designs are always iterative

The day after you build something, you switch to optimization mode. There’s an inherent appreciation in digital that solutions can be elegant, but can always be improved. The idea of constant improvements and iterative design are fundamental to digital processes. They’re also core to the beliefs of innovators.

The medium is in its infancy

Ask an industrial designer to talk about the web, and they’ll base most of their thinking in what’s current. Talk to an interactive designer about the web, and they talk about visions for the future. Every day, some new considerations enters our design lexicon. And every day, some new startup is experimenting with these tools to push the boundaries of what is possible. Digital people are adaptable and flexible.

Innovation in product is innovation in digital

To solve product and service design problems, we need to migrate towards platform thinking. A product is no longer just an object – it’s a hub of connected information and interactions. Yes, strong industrial design can create an object of desire, but without inherently and intuitively applying digital sensibilities to that product, it will arguably be less competitive. Industries like music and publishing are transforming before our very eyes, and who are the best people to lead us into this unexplored territory?

Any of these qualities on their own are factors we look for when hiring innovation consultants. But what’s incredible about interactive people is that, more often than not, they have all of these qualities. And I know this is just a starting point in a long list of skills. I’m not trying to discount the capabilities of industrial designers, researchers, or architects who have found their way into the innovation space, but I do truly believe that the inherent understanding of all the qualities outlined above put former interactive practitioners in a unique position to solve big, important problems.

So did I miss any?

When you work at an innovation consultancy, you take the word innovation seriously. For three years, I’ve worked at Idea Couture helping dozens of organizations  design disruptive future scenarios based on real consumer insights, social and societal needs, economic imperatives, and technological signals. For many of these clients, I’ve seen real innovation happen.

What’s interesting is that none of these clients talk about how “innovative” they are. But they live it. In the grand scheme of things, these are the companies pushing the boundaries of their industries and changing their own internal values systems. That’s real innovation to me.

For your average everyday consumers, innovation means disruptive innovation. Does a car that reads your Facebook news feed really deserve to be called innovative, or is it just novel? Is a CPG company that releases Organic shampoo in 2011 really innovative, or are they just opportunistic? Is a communications campaign that crosses multiple channels really innovative, or could it just be clever? I’d argue that very few of the “innovations” that companies advertise are really innovations, and even fewer of them are truly representative of a general organizational culture.

As a result, in the corporate and consumer world, the word is at risk of completely losing its meaning.

These days, it seems impossible to turn on the TV, open a magazine, read a blog post or listen to a CEO without hearing a company’s “commitment to innovation”. What’s I find truly unfortunate is that the disciplines of PR and marketing are bastardizing a term with immense power and meaning. Having spent plenty of time studying the internal models of innovation at some of the world’s most “innovative” firms, I can tell you that their internal processes are innovation blockers, not innovation enablers.

The dirty truth is that while most of these firms love the idea of innovation (and may even be filled with innovative people), they hate innovation in practice. Innovation “introduces risk” instead of mitigates it. Innovation casts doubt on how things have traditionally been done. Innovation results in disagreements. Innovation unearths cultural gaps within organizations. Real innovation is culturally hard.

Most companies are happy make incremental improvements or to explore novel changes. The refusal is to reset their understanding of their competitive landscape and to accept that their industries are fundamentally at risk. They’re fine with turning money into ideas (R&D), but not turning ideas into money (innovation).

So please, stop calling your company “innovative”. Yes, you make incremental improvements to your products. Yes, you invest in R&D. But at the end of the day, if you’re unwilling to shift adapt your core organizational values based on societal, social, and technological changes, you’re just fooling yourself. Until your organization is willing to rethink its relationship with its customers, reimagine what the future will look like, and reset its view of the industry it competes in, it’s not really innovative.

If you’re really committed to innovation, don’t just tell us about it. Live it.

Needless to say, the process of preparing and presenting to the internal IC team had me pretty primed to talk about what Design Thinking is and what it means in the context of Idea Couture, business, and innovation. So I was pretty happy when I went on Quora last night and came across this great question:

Part of the challenge in answering that question is that there is no single definition of Design Thinking. From what I’ve seen and what I practice, there are four points of view on what Design Thinking really is. Each have a different connection to innovation.

1. Design thinking is a person is a person who is capable of forming ideas through abductive reasoning. Abductive reasoning implies knowing throughout intuition (no formal proof), which is effectively a new thought. Innovation through new ways of thinking.
2. Design thinking is a human centered way of viewing the world. By trying to solve problems through gaining insights around people’s needs, you’re creating new perspectives which lead to new opportunities for innovation. Innovation through new perspectives.
3. Design thinking is a series of methods allow designers better communicate ideas. Completely new concepts are difficult for most people to grasp, so using a designer’s lens on communications improves understanding. The communication of innovation.
4. Design thinking is a series of steps to guide the innovation process. It’s the meta name given to the activities involved in creating a new idea. Design thinking is innovation.

So what do you think? Agree? Disagree? Just tired of hearing the term “Design Thinking”? Let me know.

Also, here’s a copy of the internal presentation if you’re interested.

Shift Boston initiated an unusual design competition a few months ago that entailed designing an element of a lunar city in the year 2050. Having done my master’s research in space crafting and microgravity fabrication, I found this to be a rare opportunity to work on a subject like this. Together with a wonderful colleague of mine, Taylor Smith, we proposed Fool Moon* – a cooking kit that includes ingredients and recipes to prepare a three course meal for loonies.  The Gala, dubbed, “The Moon Ball” was held on October 21^st at Boston’s Center for the Arts and featured many speakers including astronaut Jeff Hoffman.

The competition was designed around  two categories, the first asked participants to design an actual lunar base including many technical considerations. The second encouraged teams to think about the leisure side of living on the moon and to think radically in order to design anything from games to making movies.  The open competition welcomed individuals from any background to apply and submit their work. The feedback to the competition was simply spectacular – more than 130 submissions were sent to the committee from all around the world. Teams of one to three individuals worked on their concepts over five months and came up with a pleasantly diverse spectrum of proposals.

This competition, the applicants, and the eagerness to particpate gives us a hint about the thirst in the world for cross-disciplinary projects and active members who promote them and make them a reality.  As I listened to the very inspiring presentation by Dr. Hoffman, I looked around the room and saw architects, professors, engineers and fine artists with huge range of backgrounds and skills and one common passion: Human space exploration. This leads me into my argument that contextual training and collaboration is much more powerful than subject lead tuition.

We constantly identify ourselves with the commonalities that we have with our family, friends and colleagues. We become closer when we have something in common and this in turn influences how intimate and involved we get with the world around us and consequently increases our engagement with our daily activities. This is also the basis of collective learning and peer mentorship, none of which is novel or alien to us. We begin learning and playing with others at early ages. With no doubt, we practice this in much more intuitive and direct fashions during childhood and begin to develop mental barriers as we grow. It is those barriers that ultimately limits us to the sources that feed our learning. But what keeps us from anticipating in multi-disciplinary practices? Is it the anatomy of the institutions that we are members of that does not allow us to work beyond the framework of our disciplines or is it the composite nature of interacting with others that makes it difficult for us to work together? Indeed, constitutions have conditioned us into accepting the hierarchic positions and divisions within our work environment, but there must be ways to look beyond the invisible borders that surround us and to break through the barriers of rigidity.

I believe the key is to find the common stories and interests among us and to apply our unique set of skills and abilities in our shared context. Finding stories will not become a reality unless we accept the importance of collective learning and collaborative work and let our playful part come out. It is only in such a situation that we can foster our creativity and the magic will glimmer.

* The project was mentioned as one of the notably unique submissions. To see more visit:  http://shiftboston.blogspot.com/2010/11/notably-unique-submissions_29.html

There are 365 days in the year and our travel luggage spends most of that time buried away in the closet.  When luggage is not being used, it takes away valuable space, and adds to the frustration of clutter creating awkward surfaces that are difficult integrate with other items.

After 100 years in the travel luggage and all the changes that the industry has been through, it is ultimately the consumers who have changed most. With a decrease in leisure travel, and an expansion of alternative means to carrying luggage from the onset as a result of increased air travel restrictions, luggage manufactures have witnessed a near perfect storm.  Retailers in particular have felt the pinch of the great recession and some brands are facing severe economic uncertainties. Research indicates that changes in air travel behavior are here to stay, and while some luggage manufacturers are forecasting expansion into overseas market development in the hopes of luring customers similar to those found in North America, the luggage manufacturers will need to take a more serious look at where they are heading toward and what they are planning to do about their business in terms of strategy and innovation.

What hope is there for the North American luggage industry to survive into the next decade?  What else can this industry do with their manufacturing expertise and brand equity?  How can they to tap some new value streams for consumers? What are some other ways to reframe the context of luggage and how it gets used?  What are some alternative functions or features that could be used in the home and the urban environment?

The following explorations pertain to ideas and opinions expressed over innovation for travel luggage industry.  The directions, departures and themes illustrated here are meant to serve as a starting point around a discussion of innovation, and do necessarily reflect the actual brand names that have been referenced.

One direction could see the extension of luggage docking familiar to travellers brought into the home environment.  This habit formed “Loading and Unloading Zone” serves as a system that can be installed by the DIY homeowner.  Key features would be stowed away storage bins, vanity mirror/wall organizer and an innovative dust trap/deodorizer for the front hallway.

A step down from the built environment could be realized as a mobile cart with integrated lighting and storage systems.  The carry-on luggage would be stationed as temporary shelving unit capable of offering up usable space in a chaotic environment.  Ambient lighting on both floor and ceiling with combined use of mirror would open up even the narrowest of passageways.

Another extension of mobility, this idea focuses on individual docking of carry-on luggage and the interplay of visibility and usable space.  Additional features would include ambient ceiling light, air-scrubbing plants (such as Bamboo Palms) and aromatic fragrances through co-branded vendors.

In this last example, here is an exploration around a stationary unit, meant to be compatible with other electronics and entertainment style furniture.  Featuring a duality of faces through the use of a swivel base, this unit allows the user to display or conceal the luggage depending on scenario of use.  Other conveniences such as magazine rack, shoe organizer and lower cupboard space invite the user to display this station which is made from the same materials and construction as the luggage itself.

]]> http://www.ideacouture.com/blog/2011/01/03/pack-the-bags-for-a-new-direction/feed/ 0 http://www.ideacouture.com/blog/2010/09/26/idioms-and-insights/ http://www.ideacouture.com/blog/2010/09/26/idioms-and-insights/#comments Sun, 26 Sep 2010 15:18:38 +0000 Morgan Gerard http://www.ideacouture.com/blog/?p=4646

In a business culture of innovation, there are some things you should never hear:

Seeing is believing. Who feels it knows it. A picture is worth a thousand words.

Humans love idioms, those catchy little phrases that make the world seem so much more simple than it really is. Like GPS systems programmed through tradition and by consensus rather than through position calculation and by engineers, they cling to sophistries that allow them to navigate their own social and cultural complexities with the confidence that, as long as they agree on having correctly arrived at a destination, the route taken was the correct one.

It wasn’t. Like husbands who refuse to accept the fact that they can’t follow maps while driving, idioms can lead us astray.

Because idioms are collocated words that, over time and like bits of garbage in a dump, stick together until they are fused into one sticky mess, we forget just how originally mismatched they might be. How can seeing be believing? Or feeling be knowing? Or the communicative value of words be subject to a higher currency exchange when trading up for a single picture? They aren’t and they can’t, except for the fact that the sheer span of time over which they have been used and the consensus that language groups amass over that time have made them so.

Idioms, like assumptions, can make an ass out of you and me, especially when they are of the type that require a sharing of an epistemological framework rather than an, arguably, more simple linguistic one. In using them, we run the risk of abdicating our critical faculties to become sociological simpletons.

Here, I’m not ignoring language as the progenitor of epistemology. It is; how we talk about the world helps us make and perceive the world we live in. Instead, I want to raise a contrast with the oldest idiom in the English language: kick the bucket. We all know what it means – die – because we are part of the language group that assembled the word ‘kick’ and ‘bucket’ together to express the end of life. Simple or harmless enough, right?

In combining ‘seeing’ and ‘believing’, however, we give birth to a phraseolexeme of more epic proportions, one that requires us to leap from a combination of things that have been put together to give us a quicker, easier and often more amusing or light-hearted way to capture an idea to a combination of actions, emotions and sensory inputs that, when combined, support certain mythologies of the world that help us ignore or, to conjure Roland Bathes, ex-nominate the complexities of the world around us.

Idioms are an anathema to innovation. They fuse organizations to assumptions, cultural mythologies and fossilized ways of seeing and talking about themselves, their business and, more importantly, their consumers.

Case in point: the consumer research game. Virtually every market research department in every major organization is founded on an idiomatic understanding of consumers. Psychographic caricatures of actual humans, like the Active Mom, have become business idioms used to simplify and, more importantly, agree on the polysemy of what are lived preferences, behaviors, opinions, attitudes and needs rather than PowerPoint descriptions such as, “Mary is a successful real estate agent who struggles to balance taking care of her three kids with her love of pilates and desire to eat healthier breakfast bars.”

Big organizations thrive on small ways of seeing and talking to themselves about the world of consumers. It seems necessary, considering the amount of work to be done, the short windows for socializing ideas internally and the efficiency that is required to transform ideas into products or services via multiple stakeholders, partners, agencies and channels. But it can lead to missed opportunities.

Don’t blame the market research department. They’re just following orders. But the oversimplification does seem to begin there. Whether it’s the result of a lack of fascination with human complexity, a lack of training or experience in decoding that complexity, or simply following age-old work processes, traditional research models, methods and modes of communicating findings from them are one of the reasons why internal innovation initiatives fall flat on their face.

So how can market research departments create better innovation opportunities?

RELY ON MORE THAN JUST SEEING TO BELIEVE
Observations are not insights. There is tactical value to observed behaviors, like watching a consumer have difficulty opening your package, but these can only be applied to refinements or extensions of your product or service. Insights are the result of observation, maybe conversation and an ability to frame data both in the context of the consumer’s experience as well as a theory or theme that helps to explain (and act upon) that experience. Given that believing typically needs to the claim of knowing, it is critical that researchers do more than observe to create their insights and find more creative ways to communicate those insights than show stakeholders what they have observed.

STOP JUSTYIFYING KNOWLEDGE BASED ON FEELINGS
Research personnel love to point out that they know they are not the consumer. They are consumers and they do feel it, but that still doesn’t mean that they know it. Good researchers understand that great research is the result of a calculated balance of subjectivity and objectivity. There is no formula to casting off your assumptions in and beyond the field. Instead, understanding and communicating consumer lives requires a phenomenological approach, some clinical analysis and team of sounding-board collaborators – all of which help you get to know and get you beyond what you think you know.

FIND BETTER WAYS TO SHARE YOUR FINDINGS
In this business, we love PowerPoint. But our love of it limits (for those whose presentations suck) and structures (for those who understand how to tell stories in it) our capabilities to communicate our findings and insights. Photos from the field are more subject to this rule than text or charts. A picture might be worth a thousand words to someone who took it and knows the context in which it was taken, but the amount of interpretation that can be read into that picture once it moves beyond the author leaves room for misinterpretation. Photos, like music, are not a universal language. Annotating them with the interpretations, insights, explanations and contexts that give meaning will safeguard them down the line. Incorporating them into scenarios or experience maps will help lock that meaning down even further and provide a more valuable tool for executives, brand managers, designers and other downstream audiences.

AIM BEYOND YOUR TARGET
Organizations that subscribe to developing products or services only for target consumers run the risk of missing social, behavioral or usage adjacencies that might exist elsewhere. Sure, your focus groups tell you (probably because that’s how you recruited participants in the first place) that so-called Active Moms are a fantastic target for breakfast bars. But if you haven’t had a real breakthrough in the breakfast bar category in years or, for that matter, ever, maybe it’s time to start learning elsewhere. Instead of Mary, consider Mike. “Mike likes to watch late-night UFC fights at home in his Tapout t-shirt and underpants while eating Oreos. He thinks breakfast bars are for sissies.” Trust me, you’ll learn something from Mike that you can use to understand him and maybe even apply to Mary.

Organizations are increasingly turning to open innovation platforms as their source of innovation.

Open innovation platforms (or crowdsourcing platforms) are a way to involve consumers in the process of innovation. Here at IC, we have built examples pretty amazing open innovation platforms – the Aviva Community fund and the MIT Ideas Challenge that are helping prove the case. You can also check out Open Innovators for dozens of other examples of programs that work. As our fearless leader Idris Mootee recently wrote in his article What you don’t know about Crowdsourcing and why they often fail, it’s not a silver bullet for innovation. But when used in a defined way as part of the research and development process, they can be quite successful.

Solving the worlds problems one 2×2 at a time

A lot of organizations struggle to wrap their heads around open innovation platforms because they toil with their purpose in the innovation cycle – what is the role of the platform within the innovation pipeline. With that in mind, I’ve spent a bit of time sketching an organizational principal for open innovation platforms. Obviously an organization can choose to involve external parties at any point in the innovation process – but the emphasis of this thinking is focused on what would be classically viewed as research through development (as opposed to the commercialization).

Do you have a problem? X AXIS
The first decision criteria is “Is there a defined problem”.

On one side of the equation, many organizations are submitting or asking explicit questions to the audience for solving – they have a defined problem to be solved. For example, Innovation Exchange solicits “Challenges” (specific problems to solve) from major corporations. I call this “innovation inspired by the business” – the key driver of creativity is based off of a fundamental business-side need or problem.

On the other side, some organizations just want good ideas that align with their brands – they have undefined problems and look to the crowd to both explicitly state challenges and opportunities. In short, they hope the crowd both provides both self identifies the problem and articulates a solution to the problem. An example of this would be the over-mentioned “my Starbucks ideas”. I call this “inspired by invention”, as it often manifests itself through the creative ingenuity of the crowd. It could just as easily be called “Innovation inspired by needs”.

When can the crowd play? Y AXIS
The second decision criteria is “When do you involve the crowd”?

On one side of the equation, organizations involve external participants early in the innovation process. Involving customers early results in raw, often messy ideas that may or not reflect any possible reality. I think of this as a platform for actively soliciting feedback for “opportunity collection” because there tend to be a lot of undefined directions that can be pursued or that can inspire lateral thinking.

On the other side, organizations can involve participants late in the innovation process. At this point, organizations are often looking for full concepts, designs, or solutions that represent a full solution to a problem. Examples of this would be Google’s Lunar Prize, where the criteria for winning is to “successfully land a privately funded craft on the lunar surface and survive long enough to complete the mission goals of roaming about the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and sending a defined data package, called a “Mooncast”, back to Earth.”. This is an example of “solution collection” – getting many external participants to come up with multiple, well articulated solutions.

The quadrants of organization-led open innovation platforms

Based on this model for understanding open innovation platforms, there are four primary opportunities for organizations to use open innovation platforms to drive the innovation process internally.

Defined Problem + Early Involvement = Crowdstorming. Articulating a specific problem to consumers and asking for many raw responses. This is pretty much like a massive brainstorm, and works as a way to stock the innovation pipeline early. Output: Lots of raw solutions to a specific problem with varying quality. Example: Fiat Mio

Undefined Problem + Early Involvement = Researching. Ask consumers to come up with solutions to undefined problems. The real value here is the articulation of previously unknown or unmet needs, collected through the initial articulation of customer problems used as a rationale for the solution. Output: Explanation or justification of previously unarticulated consumer challenges or needs with a small number of solutions of varying quality. Example: Dell Idea Storm

Defined Problem + Late Involvement = Prototyping. When you involve the consumer at this point, you’re really asking for a specific designed solution to a problem. Depending on how late in the innovation process they are involved, the output can be anything from concept sketches to fully-functioning prototypes. Output: Depending on how late the challenge is put to the crowd, and how defined the solution must be, expect a small number of solutions. Example: Supdaroo or one of my favorite sites, threadless.

Undefined Problem + Late Involvement = Adopting. Some organizations choose to build idea orphanages, allowing external participants to submit fully thought-out and conceptualized product concepts that may or may not align with their interests. Would-be inventors can submit their concepts with the hope of the organization moving on their idea. Output: Well thought out ideas that may or may not be relevant to the organization. Example: Lego Design By Me

Yes, no maybe so?

Obviously open innovation platforms differ in terms of where they play in an organization’s innovation cycle. In practice, each of the quadrants of the open innovation platform classification isn’t mutually exclusive. But in terms of understanding where their value lies, I think it’s a good starting point.

So what do you think? Agree with the classification? Have any recommendations on how to make it better? Have any great examples of crowdsourcing applications that I’ve missed? Join the comment thread and let me know. Also, if you’re interested in Open Innovation and the Virtuous Cycle, be sure to read Henry Chesbrough’s epic book Open Innovation.

The Clever Little Bag by Puma

Recently Puma announced the Clever Little Bag that will reduce their environmental footprint. As a shoelover, a shoebox is not only an environment problem but a space saving issue that involves all shoelovers who live in small condos. The Clever Little Bag not only solves the bigger problem at hand such as sustainability and carbon emission but it also reduces cluster in everyone’s home.

The R3 Green experiment by Petz Scholtus and Sergio Carratala

I stumbled upon this article on ReadyMade magazine and its about a Spanish couple in Barcelona who turned their own home into a green experiment. The couple used as many recycled materials as they could to create a carbon neutral home that follows the 3R principles: Reduce, Recycle, Respect. One of the coolest things in their apartment is the Wine Crate cabinets in the kitchen. You can follow the instruction and make one yourself with this check list.

Obsessive Consumption by Kate Bingaman-Burt
Obsessive Consumption started out as an art project by Kate Bingaman and it’s a project that I have been following for a few years. Kate, the artist, started out by creating a personal record of what she buys everyday and she draws out credit card statements for every single item she buys. The collection of drawings is getting bigger and bigger and she has finally started a blog to document this project. Why is this project green you ask? The drawings of what we consume serve as a reminder for all of us to think twice about how much we consume on this planet and by looking at the colourful drawings of these consumptions you are able to reflect on your own. When everyone is doing it- that’s a good starting point for reducing waste.

Happy Earth Day!