By Paul Arnold
Unless a giant asteroid smacks into the planet and humanity goes the way of the dinosaurs it’s fair to say that social media is here to stay. The phenomenon has already become part of the fabric of our lives and is transforming the way many companies interact with their partners, suppliers and customers.
But even as the business world is getting to grips with this powerful marketing tool another networking revolution is underway, one that is helping organisations innovate faster.
Realising that Facebook, Twitter and other digital platforms can be more than just exciting ways to increase exposure, a handful of businesses are integrating social media into their open innovation processes. For some, the results have been nothing short of phenomenal, and though they have barely scratched the surface of what can be achieved, the momentum they’ve created is unstoppable.
The intersection of social media and open innovation makes it possible to tap into fresh sources of knowledge by creating communities that are driven by social media tools. This opens up an exciting new world of possibilities for faster innovation, superior product ideas and speedier times to market.
According to Stefan Lindegaard, open innovation guru and author of Social Media for Corporate Innovators and Entrepreneurs, open innovation and social media are obvious bedfellows:
“The reason why they’re becoming inseparable relates to the fact that the two are linked by the need for interactions between people both inside and outside an organisation. Interaction and involvement are key elements for both open innovation and social media.”
Pioneers
One company at the forefront of this revolution is Psion, a maker of rugged handheld computers. In 2010 it launched Ingenuity Working, an online open innovation platform where it works directly with customers, developers and partners to solve problems and co-create new variants of its popular products.
The fruits of this bold endeavour were apparent almost immediately when Psion’s Omnii product family was pre-launched to 47 selected customers and partners at a very early stage of development.
Discussions were held in a secured zone on Ingenuity Working and they resulted in Psion being told it had got the keyboard wrong. As Nick Eades, Psion’s Chief Marketing Officer says, this heralded something of a watershed moment.
“To have your engineers, who are always right, actually accept that when the customer says, ‘this is wrong here’s a better way to do it’ it is a quantum leap. They’ve never had this level of exposure before.”
Ultimately this led to better products, but the linking of social media and open innovation has brought even greater benefits.
“It’s opened doors for us to get our products into markets which are five to ten times the size we’re in,” adds Eades. “Through Ingenuity Working we’ve had conversations that have become business meetings that have become proof of concepts. These are now in the contractual stages with innovators in universities, pharma companies and other areas I can’t tell you about and they are utterly game changing.”
Supporting Innovation
Together, social media and open innovation offer a number of attributes that support innovation processes:
Richer interactions with customers and partners
It’s no longer just one company speaking to another or to many companies. Now every member of a social media community can engage with each other, having conversations that would never have previously been possible. Just imagine what could happen when these partners are interacting.
Freeing up creativity
The openness of social media gives people the opportunity to think and talk about things they wouldn’t normally discuss in a formal business atmosphere. They feel freer to ideate.
Improving crowdsourcing
Frequently crowdsourcing initiatives generate far too many ideas. How do you deal with 100,000 people having 100,000 conversations? The answer is you cannot and with social media you don’t need to as the crowd is a filter that highlights the best ideas.
Solving Challenges
You can also create social media communities of people who are interested in solving a specific challenge.
Syngenta, aleading agri-business has tried to crack a crop yield problem for a number of years but without much success. To bring in new thinking it reached out to IdeaConnection, an open innovation intermediary in Canada.
Together they devised an innovation platform called IdeaRally, a kind of social network where innovators were invited to generate ideas and in-depth discussions in a week-long virtual think tank.
“The IdeaRally is a really good example of building a one-off social network and giving it a push in a direction without trying to control the conversation,” said Paul Wagorn, VP Business Development at IdeaConnection. “We get hundreds of people with a common interest and give them a platform where they can have an open discussion and come up with ideas and solutions that wouldn’t have been realised on a one-to-one or one-to-many sort of relationship.”
The IdeaRally with Syngenta not only generated a number of ideas that it’s now working on, but it also electrified the company’s scientists to look at their long-standing crop yield problem in different ways.
Act Now
Innovation through interaction and engagement with people all over the world is getting easier and will become even more so as new social media platforms develop and companies learn how to better leverage them for their needs.
This is largely unchartered territory and there’s precious little supportive data out there as we are still only in the very early stages of this intersection. To the risk averse, the pace, depth and breadth of change can be frightening. But Stefan Lindegaard argues that the potential for faster and more diverse innovation are too great to ignore. He believes companies should act now:
“Yes, there will be initiatives that do not work and you might feel as the only one playing in the sandbox, but others will join, you will adapt and the experiences gained can bring competitive advantages in the short, mid and long-term.”
Paul Arnold is a former BBC producer who worked on science, news and magazine programmes, travelling the world to interview Nobel Prize winners, business leaders, politicians and celebrities. After 16 years he left the corporation and moved to Spain where he writes for publications and businesses across Europe and North America
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