Information and communication technology company 2e2 asked nearly 2,000 workers how they experience the nine-to-five grind. The responses confirmed the results of earlier polls and studies showing workers are actually more productive away from the office: 55 percent of those 2e2 asked said they got more done working from home.

Slightly more surprising was the respondents’ choice of the location where they’re at their most creative. Where do they feel they get their most innovative ideas?

• 47 percent said the best discussions about business ideas come when people get together in a pub or restaurant.
• 24 percent said the office boardroom.
• Online discussions were chosen by 19 percent.

This will be great news for knowledge workers looking to convince the boss to splurge on working lunches and a few rounds of drinks (though, it’s assumed, creativity falls off pretty sharply if you overdo the libations). It’s also food for thought for the laptop addicts among us, suggesting making time to get away from our screens and talk to actual humans is valuable and often overlooked.

But even if these less-than-rigorously scientific findings confirm the enduring affection of Brits for the pub more than any hard and fast intelligence for business leaders, the idea that place influences creativity and that our choice of locale is often knee-jerk and uninspired is worth considering.

Where do you get your best business ideas?

Image courtesy of Flickr user @rgs.

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Clarity is key when you reach beyond your company’s walls to ask for ideas. Customers don’t take part in your enterprise training and so any technology needs to move to the background and allow customers to easily add their ideas and feel that they provide and gain value as a result. IdeaNet supports this through a tool that keeps people on the homepage, and doesn’t require a lot of clicks or any deep understanding of the process.

But IdeaNet’s not just about ideas; Inmagic’s clients are looking for dialogue with their customers. Green paraphrased innovation expert Kimberly Watson-Hemphill to note that the voice of the customer comes from listening, while the heart of the customer comes from dialogue. IdeaNet goes from idea to dialogue by providing customers and product managers with a clean, no “gunk” environment for their conversations. The application helps to make customers comfortable with offering new ideas and enhancements, but also offers easily understood discussions spaces, and the ability to vote. From the product manager perspective it is easy to find, moderate, organize, and analyze the submitted ideas — and includes the ability to add weighted voting behind the scenes. There is automatic avoidance of idea duplication, though even this task begins a dialogue to be sure the customer is being understood (a product manager can refine an idea to highlight differentiating nuances in a customer’s idea, but the original post, and any revisions, are kept in a wiki-like form in case the history becomes valuable.)

Inmagic also serves as an adviser as clients think about how to deploy IdeaNet. For clients with innovation management experience who are moving from prior systems that didn’t quite meet their needs, Inmagic is able to offer a system with search and management features focused on B2B dialogue. For clients new to innovation management, or perhaps moving from old style “request for enhancement” systems (which are basically electronic suggestion boxes), Inmagic can suggest ways of interaction that are likely to capture good ideas from customers while also creating customer community. Inmagic can also advise on organizational workflows to support product management and help the client set the permissions and views to match that workflow.

I think the combination of the application’s features and the power of customization to match particular workflows and communities is sure to make IdeaNet a player in the growing innovation management ecosystem.

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This is “open innovation“: The use of internal and external information to develop innovations — and then taking those ideas to market either internally or through other organizations. As individuals, we have a fair amount of control over how we practice open innovation. In large organizations, however, the process generally needs to be formalized. Open innovation is important, but can be complex in companies where the innovation process involves a large number of business units, systems that may not even have been invented yet, and policies and procedures that are evolving.

An interesting example of open innovation is the SAP Co-Innovation Lab (COIL) as SAP and its partners have found a way to integrate hardware and software innovation in a way that is open, but also protective of intellectual property. From the COIL homepage: “COIL enhances the capabilities of SAP’s partner and customer ecosystem through an integrated network of world-wide expertise, and best-in-class technologies and platforms.” SAP worked with founding sponsors Cisco, HP, Intel and NetApp to set up the initial co-innovation laboratory at SAP’s Palo Alto, CA. facility. (There are also now facilities in Tokyo, Bangalore, and São Paulo.)

COIL is successful, at least in part, due to how the partners have managed the technical, human, and organizational dimensions of the innovation process. The physical structure of the COIL facility allows the organization to install relevant hardware and software in a collaborative but safe environment. It also provides a modular co-working area for the most intensive portions of the collaboration where face-to-face interaction is required, and a showcase area where customers can come and see the joint result. The organizational infrastructure lets the companies start with a framework intellectual property arrangement.

In a recent meeting I had at SAP on the topic of open innovation, David Cruickshank, director of the Co-Innovation Lab, noted,  ”COIL is a unique approach and now we’re trying to do more.” Even a company the size of SAP can gain value from co-innovating with partners and customers through trust and open innovation. The key takeaway is that this is not ad hoc collaborative innovation. It is a formal approach calling on the appropriate business units and team members of all involved companies in a well-considered strategy.

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One of the most common definitions of crowdsourcing is “an open call to an undefined group of people.” This definition would seem to exclude a call for input to a more defined and limited group: your employees. Crowdsourcing techniques, however, leverage online technologies to “harness” the input of many and to apply that input toward getting results of some kind, so why can’t they also be applied to the people within an organization instead of without?

Some popular uses of crowdsourcing include:

• Crowd wisdom where many can contribute possible answers to questions.
• Crowd innovation where many can participate in problem-solving.
• Crowd creation where many can be part of producing something and often each participant takes a smaller piece of the whole based on their skills and abilities.
• Crowd voting where the best ideas “bubble” to the top by community review and voting.

Why not take these models and apply them to problem-solving, creative brainstorming, and creation tasks within your organization? You can even use readily available crowdsourcing technology and platforms to facilitate those processes.

Where can you go for crowdsourcing technology? Companies like Chaordix and Spigit specialize in “innovation management,” and they’ve built online tools to manage input from groups and allow for voting and other features to facilitate “crowd” participation. Even a DIY crowdsourcing system such as the one offered by Crowdtap could prove an interesting tool when the “crowd” you use for input and feedback isn’t a large random pool of unknown people but actually the folks working within your own organization.

In organizations, there is a tendency for each team member to operate strictly within their department or division. In virtual teams, these divisions may be less obvious, but the silos still exist, and may even be worsened due to the lack of proximity. By using crowdsourcing tools and applying more democratic methods of soliciting crowd input, allowing for group voting of ideas, and reaching across departments for participation, you may be able to:

• Innovate more quickly because you are tapping into your team in different ways
• Identify issues and reach solutions more effectively by utilizing your team more widely
• Gain insights into your team’s talents and abilities by providing more open opportunities for participation

In some situations, crowdsourcing can take on a competitive edge in the form of a contest or competition where participants are rewarded in some way for the “best” solution — and the best solution is often not something determined by a top-down approach, but rather by the votes of the crowdsourcing community as a whole. We’ve previously written about the gamification of work; in some circumstances, applying a competitive layer to participation in problem-solving or innovation initiatives can increase motivation and stimulate better responses.

Using your team for crowdosurcing can not only help to “get things done,” it can potentially produce fresh, interesting and beneficial results.

Editor’s note: Aliza’s new book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Crowdsourcing, has just been published by Alpha.

Image courtesy of stock.xchng user lusi 

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Think about the following questions in relation to past jobs that you loved or hated. They will help you figure out what kind of projects you really want to work on now.

1. Teamwork. Do you prefer to work as part of a team where you can collaborate closely with other people on regular basis? Or are you happiest when people leave you alone and you can just get things done with minimal interaction? If you prefer to work alone and you end up in a job where you have to work very closely with other people, the chances of being happy are slim. Likewise, if you want to work as part of a team, you will likely feel alone, isolated and unhappy on solo projects. Finding a project or job that matches your team style can make a big difference in your job satisfaction.
2. Leadership. Are you happiest when leading a team of people on a project, where you can be in the driver’s seat? Or would you rather stay out of the limelight and work in the background? Just because you want to be in a leadership position doesn’t mean you can jump right into one right away, but you can look for opportunities to lead smaller portions of a project, to prove your leadership capabilities and set yourself up to move into leadership. On the other hand, if you aren’t happy leading, don’t get suckered into taking a lead job, even if it comes with a little more money. If you hate your job, a few extra dollars a month probably won’t make up for it.
3. Innovation. Do you like to come up with ideas that are revolutionary and new? Or do you prefer to take an evolutionary approach to make existing ideas and projects better? If you enjoy the latter, then you should be careful not to get into positions where you are responsible for coming up with groundbreaking ideas. It can also be a good idea to pair up with team members of the other type so that people are coming up with new ideas and others are working to make them better over time.
4. Employment. Do you crave stability and the benefits that come with being a full-time employee? Or are you happiest when you are working as an independent consultant with flexibility and the ability to control your work? There are many advantages and disadvantages of both, so it helps to know what you prefer.
5. Technology. Do you have specific technologies that you can’t live without? Or do you use whatever your employer or client prefers? If you are a diehard Apple  fan, the chances of being happy in a job where you have to use a Windows  laptop and BlackBerry  phone are slim. Some companies run on email while others use more collaborative technologies, so make sure you ask about technology usage if you have any strong preferences.

A few other things that are important to keep in mind:

• Is the project interesting to you?
• Do you get to work with people whom you want to spend time with?
• Do you like working for your manager or client?

Finding a project or job that plays into your preferences can mean the difference between a miserable experience and a happy one. Think about how you really want to work, then work toward a position that matches your preferences and makes you enjoy your work.

How do you stay happy on the job?

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Lars Plougmann.

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Innovation management is not that different from sales management. You start with leads. Leads and ideas are raw concepts that don’t have current value — a company can’t invest time and effort into them.

This analogy resonated with me: By putting innovation management in parallel with a well-understood organizational process, like sales management, you can see possible metrics without having to start from scratch. It opens the concept of innovation management to anyone who has ever thought about sales management and optimization of the sales process.

Continuing the sales analogy, once the good ideas have been identified, innovation managers can merge them into a proposal for further vetting and qualification, like leads would be combined into an opportunity in the customer relationship management process. Carbone noted that it is in this proposal stage where the company has reason to contribute resources, and additional participants are invited. Feasibility and financials are considered, and there can be multiple rounds of scorecarding, if required. He also suggested that companies may want to rank a set of proposals based on the scorecard and then use that to decide what new features or ideas to continue in development for their project or service.

Carbone went on to point out the importance of social networks in preparing people for this kind of innovation. Facebook has gotten people interested in sharing and collaboration, while Digg gave us expectations around mass sharing how to surface good content:

It’s because of tools like Facebook and Digg that companies became able to manage ideas. Before that it was a very cumbersome workflow as people were trying to track every idea that came in using email and spreadsheets. The collaboration social front-end helps you weed out ideas at a minimal resource requirement. But it’s not collaboration for collaboration’s sake. You need to tell people what you want them to collaborate on, i.e. going green, cost savings, new products, process improvements. And once you do that, still no-one makes a business decision just based on the crowd.

Carbone’s take is that innovation management might just be the killer app of the social software revolution. That said, his perspective is also realistic — and it should be, as Brightidea was founded in 1999 and has grown through some tough times:

There’s nothing in our software that is going to magically motivate people to use the software and make people contribute. You’re going have to set the incentives and the programs. The software is a facilitating factor in the equation. It’s a utility for managing the innovation process which has never really been tracked before.

Client examples

I asked Carbone for an example of a client that had integrated Brightidea with its innovation management process for a great result. He named two very different companies: Robert Bosch Tool Corporation and BT.

Bosch has used Brightidea both internally and with customers. For example, you can submit your ideas for new Dremel tool or accessory, and employees can submit ideas for RotoZip improvements. What stuck with me was how thoughtful Bosch was around blending their aspiration for internal participation with the realities of their performance management system. Their call center employees are encouraged to submit ideas, but call center employees have quotas for the number of calls they handle. How do they balance time for ideas with time for calls? One manager is asking for ideas, another is asking for high call volume. The company put these issues on the table and worked with the managers of the call center to highlight the importance of innovation and asked that innovation be considered along with calls, not as a formal policy, but part of their overall approach. This approach is working, and I expect allows more flexibility than would a formal policy.

BT also implemented Brightidea along with other organizational changes to support innovation: the company locates “innovation scouts” around the world, and provides significant incentives for innovation. A case study from the Brightidea site notes that, “[t]he new internal system with its dedicated innovation team, clear incentive structure and the easy-to-use software platform changed the generally pessimistic  attitude of employees towards new ideas into a positive corporate energy that keeps motivation up even in a challenging business environment.” The company reports added revenue and cost savings in excess of $100M.

The innovation/collaboration ecosystem

How does an innovation platform like Brightidea fit into the rest of a company’s collaboration space? Carbone explained, “We really buy into the idea that there’s going to be a corporate feed, like from Yammer, and we see products like ours passing information over to them.”  He acknowledged that many enterprise collaboration tools can provide basic ideation support, but for full innovation management you’ll need a system focused on the process.

I also asked Carbone about mobile access. He said, “our goal is to continuously get closer to the moment of creation. As soon as [users] come up with the idea we want to make it easy as possible to share that idea.” Mobile apps are one approach, but Brightidea also has clients using 800 numbers, voice-to-text translation, or special email addresses.

I’ll leave you with Vincent Carbone’s thoughts on success in innovation management:

Success means people are happy with giving ideas, and that those ideas can easily be routed to those that need them, and that decision-makers have the tools to involve [the broader participants] in the decision-making and implementation roadmap.

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Maybe these ideas don’t seem to be getting you anywhere. Perhaps you can’t yet see how they fit into the bigger picture of what you do, or anyone else does. Or perhaps you can make the connections, but no one else can.

Should you take your ideas seriously? Or should you shift your focus to something more mainstream?

Learning by Example

In the last few months, I’ve had the chance to speak with a number of online innovators: people who’ve started their own niche businesses, developed digital products, created entirely new segments or markets, and so on. It struck me that every day, step by step, these people had proceeded into the unknown.

Of course, each day is a step into the unknown for everyone, but most of us spend our days in the safety of an established discipline or field. Few of us ever step beyond the boundaries of what’s known.

The irony is that the web is flexible, with blurry boundaries. It has great possibilities for innovation that take us from the warm shallows into the uncharted depths beyond what we know now. For example, the work of many people has allowed social media to change the web from a “selling” medium to a “sharing” medium, and has created new boundaries: new markets, new concepts, and new ideas.

The individuals I spoke to had ideas, and they’d pursues those ideas independently of the market and their peers. They’d had to define and establish new boundaries outside the existing frameworks. Their passions had led them into a new space, and they’d wanted to make a living in that space. This had necessitated communicating the new boundaries to others, and to sell their idea to the point of becoming a profitable, business-sustaining proposition.

Recognizing Ideas

To say “someone had an idea” is, I think, an enormous simplification of the facts. Innovation isn’t all “light bulb moments” and flashes of inspiration. The process of defining a new space is something like a pregnancy. It starts with a seed of thought, which develops almost imperceptibly at first, but slowly becomes clearer and more formed. But its differentiation from the existing body of knowledge, experience and expertise can take a very long time. Eventually, though, the component parts become evident, the concept takes shape, and a new idea is recognized — perhaps only by its creator at first.

The innovator may not realize that she had “an idea” to begin with; the seed of thought may have been just one of many. But that thought resurfaced in different forms, connected with another thought, and became more clearly defined.

In short, before a social network was a social network, it may have been a way to find out who knows who (as Facebook was), a personal bulletin board made public, or a simulacrum of the water cooler. It was most likely an inclination, interest, whim, or wish before it became a development project.

Your Innovation, 2011

That niche area you’re interested in? Stay interested. Those articles you’ve been bookmarking? Read them. Those thoughts that keep circling around in your head? Keep looking at them.

Before your idea can be born, it needs time to form — and during that time, it may seem like anything but an idea. The only way to bring it to light is to follow the threads that pique your interest.

Indulge your passions or interests, and think about the issues that most appeal to you. It might not happen today or tomorrow, but you might just become one of the web’s great innovators.

How do you bring ideas to fruition?

Image by stock.xchng user Buckey.

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I began thinking about what has had the biggest impact on my ability to be an effective web worker when I heard about a PBS “Nightly Business Report” feature: 30 Most Important Innovations from Last 30 Years. This list will be announced on the show tonight.

It got me thinking about the specific technologies that make what I do possible. Using the same criteria, I made a list of some of my own most valuable innovations for the web worker.

Here are the criteria used by “Nightly Business Report” (in conjunction with Knowledge@Wharton, the online research and business analysis journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania) in making their list:

1. Did it have a direct and/or material effect on quality of life?
2. Did it address a compelling need? Did it solve a compelling problem?
3. Was it a fresh, new breakthrough? Was there a “WOW” factor?
4. Did it change the way business is conducted?
5. Did it increase the efficiency of how resources are used?
6. Did it spark an ongoing stream of new innovations on top of the original innovation?
7. Did it lead to the creation of a vast, new industry?

So given that, here are my Most Valuable Innovations for the Web Worker.

Gmail – Sure, email existed before Gmail, but the massive adoption of the ubiquitous service by web workers shows they got it right. A web-based platform with powerful search capabilities allows us to harness the massive amounts of information that flows through our email.

Skype – The distributed nature of web working means we need an easy and inexpensive way to talk with clients and colleagues. VoIP solutions like Skype offer us the ability to communicate from just about anywhere. I love it when it works.

RSS – For the publisher it offers the ability to syndicate and distribute content to the masses. For the consumer, it enables aggregation and the ability to retrieve the content more efficiently and view it on demand.

Wi-Fi/Wireless Broadband – Allows us to lose the wires and lets us work anywhere. Along with the widespread adoption of the laptop computer it turned any place in to our work place. I still maintain an office but it’s great to know I can connect from anywhere and get things done. Would the coffee shop industry really be sustainable without wireless connectivity and the web worker?

Digital Media/Streaming Music – We web workers sure do love our music. The transition from physical media to digital formats lets us take our music with us anywhere, or listen online to streaming radio services like Pandora or Slacker. I know I work better with music playing.

I know this list is incomplete, and intentionally so. It demonstrates what I think is the most important benefit to all of these innovations — the power of collaboration. It is now so easy for us to work together to create and share, I thought we could finish the list together. I’ll be watching the “Nightly Business Report” on PBS to see how many of the innovations on their list are also on this one.

What would you add and why? Let us know in the comments.

(photo via Wayne Lee)

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