We’ve all held up the Netflix Prize as a key example of how to use online prizes to drive collaborative innovation to improve predictive science.  But this week,  I encountered two stories that show a unique intersection of the gaming field and innovation in different ways.  One, from MIT Technology Review describes how companies are using games to drive new innovative thinking.  Some use games to train workers in new systems, others are used to reward “players” for channeling new ideas for improving the business.  The other from NPR’s All Things Considered (click the link for an audio file and the online transcript) showcases the winners of the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology.  The students worked with researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to adapt the Microsoft Xbox Kinect game system hardware system - a sophisticated camera and laser tracking system that monitors and processes movement by the game players – in order to create an accurate and cost effective system to analyze human gait and identify abnormal walking patters.  The idea was to improve medical diagnoses and physical therapy, and possibly help contribute to advanced prosthesis design.

So what do these stories illustrate?  We all know that taking cool technologies that were developed for other applications and re-purposing them for new uses is what Open Innovation is all about.   But these examples show how open innovation continues to manifest itself into new areas and becomes adopted both by young students to further their education, and by big companies to foster improved employee engagement.

What is the difference between a Challenge and a Grand Challenge? 

While a Challenge represents the opportunity for multiple parties to collaborate to solve a problem, a Grand Challenge is….. grander.

A Grand Challenge addresses a fundamental problem that is bigger than the need of an individual company or person.  The solution requires broad applications of expertise from multiple parties, and generally multiple industries. Many Grand Challenges also have a positive impact on society, serving an altruistic, greater good.   A Grand Challenge embodies all of the advantages of open innovation, leveraging the synergy of multiple parties collaborating to achieve a breakthrough that benefits the broader community.

For companies, Grand Challenges communicate a concise and powerful message to their entire stakeholder community.  When GE launched their Heathymagination Grand Challenge to invest $10 million in breast cancer research, they broadcast to every GE consumer that GE is committed to medical research.  At the same time, GE communicated to their investors, professional community, and supply chain that GE’s doors are open to discovering breakthrough technology.  Their traditional supply chain was essentially given notice: bring us the best, cutting edge technology or sit by the sidelines. 

A Grand Challenge energizes the investment, inventor, consumer, and technology communities because it opens large companies to the best information from any source, creating a level, competitive field for new ideas.

And the opportunity to innovate at that scale is….grand.

Co-working.  In a world of collaboration and co-creating, we now have co-working.  According to the New York Times July 17, 2011 article “Working Separately, Working Together”, freelancers and telecommuters are finding that being unshackled from the office environment is not nirvana.  Instead, it is a lonely place.   The work-at-home crowd is abandoning their corner Starbucks for membership in co-working spaces called IndyHall and Hive.  These 5000 square ft., open floor plan office spaces offer the community and collaboration that comes from a shared, non-virtual work space.  You can “rent” a cubicle (isn’t that what they were fleeing?!?) and soak in the collaborative energy of tapping keyboards and human contact.

At NineSigma, we witness this collaborative energy in our Linked Innovation programs.  Clients come together to address some of the thorniest problems, recognizing that their combined efforts can accelerate the outcome that they each seek.  One group has been working together for 6 months to address a key sustainability issue that impacts their entire industry.  Merging the perspective of nearly a dozen powerhouse corporations into a shared vision statement and action plan is no small task.  As they toiled to blend the nuances of each company’s viewpoint, I secretly admired their passion and commitment.

These companies recognize that they cannot solve the big, global challenges by “freelancing”.  Whether they are seeking new technologies to achieve their long-term sustainability goals, or finding efficient ways to meet regulatory standards that ensure consumer safety, collaboration is the accelerator.  NineSigma’s Linked Innovation program provides the “co-working” environment for them to bring together their collaborative energy into a virtual and physical place.

And like Hive and IndyHall, we even provide the coffee.

At the risk of sounding patriotic (though this is the 4^th of July), today’s topic is…FIREWORKS!  Most everyone knows fireworks were invented in China (apparently around the 7th Century), but it’s amazing how innovation in the United States and around the world has improved the “consumer experience” dramatically, even in the last 20 years.

As a kid growing up in the ‘80s, the annual 4^th of July fireworks show, viewed from the grassy fields of Barranca Mesa Elementary School, was really amazing up in the Rocky Mountains of New Mexico (we could even see the shows in Espanola and Santa Fe from over 20 miles away).  But the show was often…boring.  A few neat things here and there, lots of down time, and lack of a dazzling finale (to be fair, the budget for a show with a county of only 20,000 people was probably not that big).

So skip ahead to the ‘90s, I, along with over a million others, was privileged to see a show by the famous Santore Brothers of New Jersey. Launched from a barge off the New Jersey Shore, the computer controlled show was set to patriotic music transmitted over the radio.   Today, pretty much all shows at ballparks, outdoor concerts, and theme parks, offer a wondrous experience thematically choreographed and synchronized with music.  Aside from electronically timed firing, new innovations have reduced the amount of smoke (to be used indoors), advanced color mixing, and maybe even allowed for the emergence of the Holy Grail – spelling words in the sky!  To learn more, see also The Chemistry of Fireworks.

Happy Independence Day!

Driving the process to develop a new product vision into a final solution delivering value to customers is a process more likely to fail than succeed. According to Wikipedia, “Research findings vary: From fifty- to ninety-percent of innovation projects are judged to have made little or no contribution to organizational goals.”

An approach gaining momentum to increase the customer value created and the success rate of product development is to combine open innovation with external product prototyping.  This model expands the internal team’s access to new ideas from a broad pool of technologies and design concepts from other industries.    

For example, a global food products company acquired a manufacturing solution from the automotive industry that dramatically reduced product defects and a home appliance manufacturer acquired a dispensing technology from a food vending machine manufacturer. 

Similarly, an external product prototyping team brought the convenience and cleanliness of home detergent pour spouts and closure solutions to the paint can famous for spills and wasted product.

One thing is clear; a more holistic approach to product development is needed in order to achieve increasingly aggressive organizational goals for growth and profitability.

NineSigma’s 2011 OI Leadership Summit: Driving the Future of Open Innovation
May 2-4, 2011 · Arlington, Virginia USA

Think provocative and inspiring thought leaders. Think interactive and engaging presentations. Think new competencies and cutting edge approaches to open innovation. You are going to leave this conference inspired and wired and ready to integrate new innovative concepts into your company's innovation program.

The successful open innovation model continues to evolve at warp speed. This conference is a unique opportunity for innovation’s best and brightest to examine best approaches, share ideas and understand future directions as well as the perennial challenges in an intimate, interactive environment. You’ll need every ounce of innovative spirit and idea power you’ve got!

We’ve designed our conference to showcase how NineSigma views the innovation marketplace and what we are doing to drive the future of open innovation. If you want an infusion of bright ideas, innovative approaches and ingenious solutions, this conference is where it’s at.

And make no mistake: This isn’t your typical innovation conference. You’ll learn how to apply your fresh insights and learning’s directly to your innovation efforts! Expect to come out of this with new competencies in crowdsourcing, collaborative innovation, and accelerated product development, as well as answers to OI’s toughest challenges, and an expanded network of innovation Champions within industry-leading companies.

Register today ­— right now ­— for the innovation event of the year!

At some point in each of our careers we have learned Michael Porter’s Value Chain approach to understanding the movement of materials and information from early stages of inbound logistics to customer-facing services.  While the Value Chain model served us well over the years by providing an understanding of the various functions within a company, it has done little to represent the flow of ideas and information that lead to new innovations.  In fact, I would go as far to say that a company’s complete buy-in to the Value Chain model to represent organizational design and process flows can actually stand in the way of collaborative innovation.  Allow me to explain.

The Value Chain model portrays an organization as a segmented, linear flow of business functionality.  Many companies have designed their various departments to enable this flow, believing that they were conforming to best business practices – and the flow works fine within a typical operational cycle.  But this is only a part of what companies do.  When it comes time to innovate (i.e., stretch beyond the current bounds of the organization), people have a tendency to generate isolated solutions that are relevant only to their department, and not thought through or tested in a systemic manner.  Ever wonder why most organizations today suffer under the silo effect that inhibits the transparency of ideas and information?  A case in point is the proverbial gap between Marketing and R&D.  While ERP systems can help to alleviate some transparency issues, this does not address the core issue, and has little to no effect on innovation. 

If we were simply to take the linear Value Chain model, and bend it around the edges to create a circle (or cycle), it would have an entirely different effect within the company.  In the center of the new “Value Cycle” could be cross-functional teams, processes and social media systems that enable the introduction of new ideas from anywhere within the company, while allowing people from other departments to contribute their perspectives, thus building on and improving the original idea.  Around the outside of the new Value Cycle are the company’s suppliers, business partners, and even regulatory bodies who, if plugged into the process (i.e., the inner circle), can bring yet another perspective to what is now emerging as a new innovation that has been tested and vetted from within.  This merging of internal and external sources into a central innovation process, or cycle, must not be thought of as temporary – it has to become the norm.

If a company is still faced with what appears to be an insurmountable innovation challenge, it can reach out to yet another tier of innovation resources – the global innovation community.  Companies typically do this by instituting a technology scouting function, or simply by engaging an open innovation intermediary like NineSigma, that maintains a global network of solution providers representing virtually every technology category.  This next tier of innovation reach provides yet another perspective that comes from individual inventors, companies and universities from around the world, and often outside the company’s industry.  When new technologies and partnerships are forged from this tier, they too can become part of the inner circle of the company’s Value Cycle.  It is at this point that the company experiences the true essence and value of collaborative innovation.

One of the challenges I still see in open innovation is when it is tried in a highly conservative environment, typically an ‘old school’ engineering company.  By ‘old school’  I mean a company  that is used to doing everything the same way they have for years and years. They use external development partners such as universities and suppliers but they always first try to solve problems internally and then only if that fails will they go to a network of external partners. But typically this external network is the same groups they have relied on in the past which results in the same answers they’ve already received.

We recently wrapped up an open innovation pilot at a client who readily admits they are conservative. They were very impressed with the breadth of the potential partners we presented to them on the different projects we ran. They talked about how we “opened their eyes” on one particular project and uncovered work on the topic they were not aware of. They talked about how open innovation is an excellent way to connect with thought leaders from around the world. Another researcher talked about how the process of creating the NineSigma RFP really made them sharpen their thinking around the problem definition.

However, when the discussion turned to whether they saw open innovation as a fit to their current innovation strategy, they felt that it would be quite a while before they could adopt open innovation beyond the few projects in the pilot.

The challenge was culture. Even though they clearly saw the benefits of open innovation, they could not see how to change the culture. It is interesting that some seven years after the book “Open Innovation” was published that companies will still revert back to their old ways.

I would be interested in your thoughts and observations on the cultural aspect of open innovation adoption?

Following our highly successful Open Innovation Leadership Summit in October 2008, NineSigma will again convene a summit of our clients and other leading practitioners of open innovation from the U.S., Europe, South America, and Asia. 

The conference will take place May 2nd-4th, 2011 in Arlington, VA and will bring together proponents of open innovation from diverse industries, including consumer packaged goods, chemical, automotive, manufacturing, apparel, energy, biopharma, agricultural, food and beverage, medical device, and many others to discuss the best practices of 2010 and topics related to the future of open innovation. Topics include:

Innovating Open Innovation: What’s next?
Using crowd-sourcing to ignite the innovation process
Creating leaders and high-performing teams in Collaborative Innovation
Global Perspectives on OI: A view from every continent
Stakeholders of Innovation: What you haven’t considered
Accelerating your path to commercialization: Learn new game-changing approaches
Sustainability Case Studies
How Government entities are leveraging OI for maximum value
 

The format will be highly interactive with a focus on working with visionary thought leaders from industry and academia. Headlining our keynote speakers is Prof. Frank Piller, co-director of the Smart Customization Group at M.I.T. and a professor of innovation management at RWTH Aachen University, Germany.

Our previous Summit was widely ranked by participants as "the most inspiring innovation leadership event of the year."  The conference is small, limited to 125 participants, so that OI practitioners have the opportunity to build relationships and share actionable knowledge, new approaches, and proven best practices for driving value through open innovation, in an intimate setting.

To receive more information, visit our 2011 OI Leadership Summit webpage.

Watch what happens when you ask for volunteers to lead an innovation project.  Some individuals will wish that they were invisible while others will jump out of their seats with the enthusiasm of a first grader being offered an extra recess.  What is it that motivates people to respond in such different ways?

That is the question that NineSigma set out to answer in our partnership with Caliper.  We had often observed that a client would succeed when they had a motivated innovation champion, but they would then struggle in duplicating that success organization-wide.  After working with hundreds of clients over the past ten years, we could describe the characteristics of an innovation champion, but we did not have the organizational development expertise to answer our clients’ question “how do we create a team of people who have a passion for innovation?”

Caliper, a human resources consulting firm with 50 years of experience advising over 25,000 companies in team building, and employee and organizational development, was a perfect partner.  We found that Caliper shares many of NineSigma’s core values, like a respect for scientific methodology and an insatiable curiosity.  By combining Caliper’s expertise in human resources and personality assessment with NineSigma’s expertise in innovation, we collaborated to create the world’s first Collaborative Innovation Profile.

Caliper’s rigorous methodology started with a validation study, which included a customized innovation job analysis and development of a competency model for innovation leaders and project managers.  Caliper incorporated interview and assessment results from a sample group of Innovation professionals and implementers.  Caliper’s research team then analyzed the data to determine which traits are most associated with success within the competency model.  The result is a specialized tool that helps management and innovation professionals select and develop successful innovation teams.

Of course, the NineSigma team was eager to learn the results of our Collaborative Innovation team assessment.  No surprise to us, the results confirmed that we are a highly innovative and collaborative group.  Our partnership with Caliper is a shining example of how an open innovation company can grow through open innovation.