Crowdsourcing week Singapore 3-7 Jun 2013

If you are a decision maker around Crowdsourcing, co-creation or open innovation then Crowdsourcing week happening at Singapore between 3-7 Jun would be a very relevant event to attend.

Agenda includes extensive line-up of expert sessions on various topics around Crowdsourcing for design, How to get results from crowd, Social innovation, Academia industry collaboration and many more. There is also a Crowdfunding workshop on the last day giving a deep focus opportunity to study and benefit from this new concept.

I am sure you would be able to learn from the vast spread of latest trends in Crowdsourcing by attending this event (see list of speakers here). Below I point out some of the key principals (and food for thought) of Crowdsourcing as a curtain raiser to this gala event.

Purpose of Crowdsourcing = Does your purpose for Crowdsourcing have one of the following?

Open innovation – You know what you don’t know and now you want someone to help you with solving your known problem.
Co-creation – You are simply after creating an additional delight factor for your customers using untapped knowhow of the crowd.
Crowdsourcing – You kind of know what you want but instead of going to a traditional vendor for it you would go to a place where you can get diversity, speed, reduced cost and most importantly creative options.

Infrastructure to enable your Crowdsourcing = People, mindset, IT and social enablers which can sustain your Crowdsourcing ambition.

People with open mindset would most probably sit at the top of the list of enablers for success in Crowdsourcing; reason being - it is very easy to script a failure, either by creating  milestones and expectations which are not realistic or by rejecting the outcome of Crowdsourcing. The slow and steady rise of Crowdsourcing can be single-handedly attributed to the folks who believed in it and spread the word about their success stories.

Connectivity is at the core of Crowdsourcing, so the social strategy and online IT infrastructure (own or hired) would play a decisive role as well.

Managing the crowd = Meeting the business goals using Crowdsourcing.

If you play the above two cards well, you might end up getting more than a plateful of ideas, solutions or desired options for your Crowdsourcing campaign. It would be of prime importance to manage the contributors by finding a right balance between acknowledging only the contributions which really add value to your organization and at the same time not downgrade the rest of the contribution; after all, in all probability those may have read? merit albeit in different context or for a different situation. Challenge of managing the crowd and their inputs, as they say, is a good problem to have!

ideaken is proud to be a sponsor for Crowdsourcing week, If you happen to be at the event then we would love to catch up with you in person. Do write to us here.

Asia Academia & Industry – recipe for innovation success! (2 of 2)

(Continued from the previous blog on this subject).

We spoke about 5 modes of engagements between Academia and Industry in our previous blog. Here we would get into the details around “What it is”, “How it will shape”, “Recipe for success” for each of the 5 modes below.


1. Niche Academic projects:

What is it?

Niche Academic projects are the select projects in which there is some niche involved on both sides – i.e. academia and the industry.  In other words, it is a collaborative R&D but in the context of the academic projects that students are supposed to undertake in their curriculum.

How it will shape:

a) Currently most of the projects are taken up where only one side has an agenda. For example - student wants to do a project and approaches an industry, somehow he gets the approval and then industry somehow tries to provide some opportunity for him to create something which can be treated as a project. We believe that much more value can be created if somehow we connect industry and the academia on the premise where both have real interest in each other.

Recipe for success:

a) For academia: Make academic projects a whole lot relevant to industry needs.
b) For industry: Do not say yes to academic projects if you do not know what you want to do with the academic talent.
   
2. Innovation & Design competitions: 

What is it?

A contest where students are asked to submit innovative or creative solutions and ideas for a given problem statement. The purpose on industry side can vary from branding and positioning their company to the young and educated crowd. Or tap into a creative cool of new generation and feed the findings into their innovation funnel.

How it will shape:

a) Contribution from students will increase for the sense of self achievement and self fulfilment; these traits would have replaced some of the traditional expectations of getting a job after finishing education.
b) Academia would use innovation achievements for better positioning of the academia.

Recipe for success:

a) For academia: Give credit for being creative and the same should find its way into the mark sheet.
b) For industry: Provide more avenues for the students to really showcase their creativity in a meaningful way.

3. Competitive research funding:

What is it?

As the name says, it is a typical research funding but is competitive in nature. Unlike the commonly exercised way of research funding, which is either geographical proximity based or alumni driven,  here company will put up an initial challenge to call for proposals from set of academia in that region by forming teams. Only the best fit based on initial response will be given the said research funds.  This will bring diversity and the competitiveness, will also improve overall innovation throughput.

How it will shape:

a) Proximity or familiarity will give way to right match (where right match will be valued more than agenda of funding someone somehow). Proximity issues will be taken care by communication technologies and familiarity will give way to the need to be competitive.
b) Academia and Industry both worry about the black hole at the other end, wherein neither one trusts each other enough, going forward we see this comfort level will improve.

Recipe for success:

a) For academia - Strategy for research focus is one thing; you also need strategy for getting funded.
b) For industry – Industry must understand and encapsulate currently neglected academia goals, in their relationship with academia.

4. Open innovation: 

What is it?

Open innovation is a systematic inflow of external know how to accelerate enterprise innovation, resulting in a new or improved products, services, or processes, and therefore increase market share.  So OI is always about solutions which are already existing – may be the in minds of people, in labs or on a notepad. You really don’t start from scratch. Power of many, power of diversity, and Power of Pull makes this tick.

How it will shape:

a) First, though slowly, the misconception and wrong comparison with “open source” is declining and will get eliminated. Open in open innovation means problem is in the public domain, not the solutions.
b) IP related issues will get addressed by the realization and learning that these issues are no different than the IP issues they anyway face in other aspect of business. More importantly, there will be a realization that because there are ways to mange IP related challenges, same can be applied in case of open innovation.

Recipe for success:

a) For Academia: Spend less time on the solution, spending time on problem makes you far better prepared to solve something. Provide equal opportunity for your innovative talent, do not identify some folks, group them and label them as innovators.
b) For Industry: The point at which open innovation gets a chance - is moving backwards. So companies are starting to utilise open innovation at the same time they begin the work on a new product or a new challenge internally.

5. IP commercialization:

What is it?

Getting an IP in place is only a beginning in the technology world, there are lot many things needed to get the ball rolling and create value from the IP you have. Market assessment, Value assessment, information chart for Licensing or Sale, Locate and showcase technologies to prospects, Negotiate and Make Deals; are some of them and as a whole called as IP commercialization space.

How it will shape:

a) IP marketplace will be common soon; it may no longer depend too heavily on specialised skills in patent domain.
b) On the other hand IP transactions and licensing across borders will increase, in turn increasing the complexity and hence opening up new business opportunities.

Recipe for success:

a) For academia: Go pictorial to explain your IP, Crowdsource ideas within the campus, move fast.
b) For industry:  There is lot to learn from M&A concepts when it comes to IP commercialization, be in terms of bringing IP inside the company or licensing out of the company.

ideaken - a leading provider of collaborative innovation platform in Asia, is now also a leading innovation and research mediator for academia and industries in Asia.

Why don’t our leaders say – We should imagine more!

You routinely hear leaders asking their staff to innovate or think out of the box.  But frankly won’t they  be better off asking their staff to imagine more.   Why?  Since imagination is the key and sometimes the only way to innovate truly.  But that is easier said than done.  Imagination is a skill which needs to be developed especially since for most of the time in the adult world, we have spent being a realist and we are generally criticised for imagining or dreaming about things.

The best way to see imagination in its purest form is in children.  Observe closely the next time your child or his friends play.  They have no boundaries, they are not scared of being laughed at, they don't know what is possible and what is not and hence they can imagine freely.  As for the majority of us, we will be lucky if we could be spared some time in this state before we are brought down to our practical world.

So what can we do?  Suggest we set aside dedicated time for imagination sessions every week at our offices.  What do we do in these sessions?  Here are some thoughts to get you started.  Once you get in the flow of things, sky is really the limit.

1. Ask folks to imagine how their product will be used by consumers in the future.
2. Imagine how new features for your product will be used by your customers
3. Imagine a world where your product is not present.  How does the customer satisfy the need that your product caters to?
4. Come up with at least 10 non-traditional uses of your product.  The product should not have been designed with this use in mind.
5. Imagine how you will sell your product to somebody who does not understand your language.

I think you get the drift.  These exercises are not important and there are no right answers. But it is very important for your team members to start visualising and letting their imagination fly again.  Ensure that criticism is not allowed and reward the most revolutionary thoughts. Over a period of time, your staff should be able to imagine freely again and then the true magic of innovation can happen.

Happy Innovating! I mean happy Imagining!

Photo Blog - ideaken as innovation sponsor at TECHfluence, a technology carnival at Anna University, Chennai on 14the and 15th Feb 2013

Asia Academia & Industry – recipe for innovation success! (1 of 2)

Belief, enforcement and preaching that we are not innovative enough and we need to be more innovative are highly inaccurate and misleading!

We cannot innovate MORE by planning to innovate more. Innovation is an intersection of market dynamics, personal passion & quest for delight which follows it. Innovation will happen as long as there is a need for it to happen. The ONLY thing we as responsible citizen need to do is get out of its way, provide infrastructure and a passage for it to happen, for when it wants to happen. Period.

We won’t define innovation - it has varied meaning to different people and it is ok that way. The reason you are reading this implies you already know that Academia Industry collaboration can bring in benefits for both parties, so we will not get into why it is good and all that. Instead - We will talk about MEANS to do it. Many things I write here is part of and a derivation of information I have collected while talking to many eminent people from Academia and Industry. 

We have identified 5 key modes of engagements between academia and industry, and I will explain each of them along with challenges they face and how we think this mode of engagement will shape in the near future. And then we will talk about one key success recipe for academia and one for industry. 

We would exclude internships; industry led trainings, academic consulting etc. though they too play a role in here.

Here are these 5 modes of engagements. I will get into details for each of these in following blogs, but here is the list with concise description.

1. Niche Academic projects: Most of us ignore this as a routine activity as academia and students go on with mindset as one of the task to finish. This tiny piece holds lot into it as long as someone explores it to the extent it deserves to be explored.

2. Innovation & Design competitions: They take place all around us, but what is that one thing which can make it far more impactful in an academia industry context?

3. Competitive research funding: When you add “Competitive” word in front of ‘research funding’, can it make a bottom line difference – on ROI?
4. Starting & restarting open innovation: There are far more half baked solutions than the ones which innovators have finished working on. We will tell you why these incomplete solutions are good for their incompleteness.

5. IP commercialization: Have you recently heard a complaint from an innovator in your academia that he or she has an excellent innovation but no one wants to know about it, far from using it for their business growth. Do you wonder what wrong is prevailing?

To be continued in the next blog … (for challenges each of these modes face and how we think they will shape up, we will also talk about one key success recipe for academia and one for industry in the next blog).

ideaken as leading provider of collaborative innovation platform in Asia is now also a leading mediator for academia and industries in Asia.

Changing face of Academia Industry collaboration.

A common ground, where academia lends the conceptualization & generalization skills and the industry provides the practical reality in which the conceptualization can be rooted.

This has been and will be the root factor for this collaboration. Like every other trend, this trend too is adding another dimension to it – ‘impact’.

The expectations from the industry have risen. Not only do they look at academia for fresh ideas and primary research but they now, for a valid reason, also expect them to provide real differentiation to their outstanding problems, fulfill a need and, of course, help them make money.

Though academia has been a top source of fundamental research and know how, it also has been the biggest black hole for huge sum of funds from organizations across US and Europe. But gone or going are the days when companies invested in academic research for a tick in their strategy checklist. Gone are the days when companies never came back to see what happened to their funds, and gone are the days when an organization funded same academia, same department, headed by the same person for decades.

The reasons for this shift are many,

a) Earlier the small number of organizations who got it right, had got it right for a long time, and large number of organizations who got it wrong continued doing it wrong for a long time, and they never knew or could never admit it.

b) The most common route to industry academia collaboration has been the alumni of that academia in the respective organization as a key interface. As one can imagine this restricted the possibilities and almost made it an one to one exploration i.e. top 2-3 executives would collaborate with 2-3 academia they came from.

c) Availability of large number of fundamental innovations, be it electricity, communication technology, computing power, nanotechnology and so on, has created millions of not so fundamental but immensely beneficial applications or call it sub innovations which we all use in our daily lives.

I will leave the interpretations of above three points as to why they act as reason for the shift wherein now organizations are increasingly looking at academia for applied research and impact driven innovation, incremental innovations, even non technical and design innovations.  

Companies like ideaken play a key role in this new equation, where diverse yet systematic, based on primary research yet with sufficient social and business impact, is the new norm for academia industry collaboration.

How can SMEs benefit from Crowdsourcing?

Typically Crowdsourcing has been associated with large brand names that have huge budgets and try to involve the crowd to co-create products. Best examples which come to mind are Coca-Cola or Lays.  The key thing in these engagements is millions of fans and also budgets to spend on advertising and build up awareness.

So the question is - Can Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) use Crowdsourcing techniques since they don't have huge budgets or millions of followers?  Thankfully the answer is yes, and to do so SMEs can adopt some of the techniques described below.

More the merrier, yes but no – While it may be OK and acceptable for big brands to just focus on getting anybody to contribute, SME firms need to be very focused on who they are trying to attract. When you are small, you may not have a brand image which you can give back and which a contributor can relate to, so providing a very specific reason or a trigger is of utmost importance in order to get fewer responses which are more relevant. This will help you save lot of effort, time and money in dealing with thousands of responses. For example - if your product offering is for sports persons, then challenge their intellect such that they would want to be part of your innovation. 

Be trustworthy, but how? - Creating the trust of your customers is good for your business, but creating trust with a casual contributor overnight is not worth the effort. Use a trusted partner like ideaken, to reach out to large number of relevant and willing contributors. Once someone contributes, then you would also have time and reason to build the trust.

You are better than your bigger competition, at least at this one - One of the areas where large brands may falter is in acting on good suggestions from the crowd quickly.  This is mainly because large brands have existing businesses which they can't afford to change. On the other hand, SMEs typically don't have such limitations or say have less of it. Be nimble in your approach and act on good suggestions early.

You might as well learn few new things about open innovation while Crowdsourcing ideas for your business - which could open up new opportunities for you to contribute and benefit via open innovation initiatives by bigger players in your domain.

In summary, SME have much to benefit from Crowdsourcing, and knowing these techniques might help.

ideaken can help you Crowdsource for ideas, solution and innovation, get in touch for a special SME package.

Crowdsourcing for Branding.

I was reading a rather disturbing survey report, conducted by YouGov, which concluded that nearly half the customers (43%) don't think it is worth complaining after a bad experience and move to rival products, as they think that companies simply don't care.  This is a worrying trend from a brand engagement perspective.  Just think of it.  Products and brands are the lifeline of any organisation.  A lot of effort goes into coming up with a product with multiple teams within the organisation who work together.  No organisation can afford to lose customers in this manner.

The same survey revealed that customers would be more likely to give feedback if they receive a response (81%).  Also majority of customers (78%) were open to give feedback if there were rewards or some incentive offered for it.  Another interesting fact is that involving customers in innovation is found to fuel performance.  

While most brand managers are slowly adopting social media tools to listen and engage the customer in their product development process,  we observed following trends of using Crowdsourcing for branding.

1.  Customer feedback surveys giving way to crowdsourcing engagements - While customer feedback through surveys/interviews are established way of getting inputs, they tend to ‘lead’ the customer and thus you don't always get unbiased inputs. Surveys are also increasingly considered boring and you see most people try and avoid them.   Crowdsourcing engagement, on the other hand, is an open ended way of getting inputs and so tends to be more realistic in engaging users and capturing inputs which can be of real value for your company and eventually to end customers.

2.  Social Media tracking no longer only for  responding to customer complaints - but also for provoking responses which may not necessarily be complaints. Customers are much more vocal today and that has opened up the opportunity to involve them in building your products, service and eventually your brand. 

 
3.  Improve Brand Perception at much lower cost – In today's cluttered world, brand marketeers are finding it difficult to stand out. There is always a high possibility of someone else who spends more on advertising and steal focus from your campaign. Consumers have learned how to close their eyes and ears from constant bombardment of your ads.   Crowdsourcing campaigns offer an ideal platform for marketeers to improve their brand perception and stand out as a company which values customer inputs and preferences at a much lower cost.

4.  Develop customer base and lead users - Anybody who participates in a brand engagement initiative is very likely to develop into a customer for life, if the brand/company engages the user and values their inputs. There are many cross-sell/upsell opportunities if this group of participants are engaged and nurtured. 

Are you planning online Crowdsourcing for ideas & Solutions?

Here are some important aspects you must consider before you begin online Crowdsourcing for ideas & solutions?

What is your purpose to do online Crowdsourcing?

Check if your purpose indicates one or more of the following

a) The response you get is not as much important as the purpose of engaging with the users.
b) You have had this problem and you already tried all possible ways but are not able to solve it.
c) You don’t have any problem; you need ideas to do what you do still much better.

Note that you may have more than one purpose from above list, but typically you will have one of these as primary purpose. If your primary purpose is a) in above list, then this indicates that you want to use Crowdsourcing for marketing or branding purpose. If b) then it reflects that you would like to use Crowdsourcing for doing open innovation. Finally if c) sounds like your true purpose, it might indicate that you would like to co-create with either employees or customers.

If you struggle to fit your purpose in one or more of the above pointers then I suggest you have a second look at your plan, it might not be worth Crowdsourcing.

How would you enable online Crowdsourcing?

One sure way is to develop a website or pages within your website. It takes anything between 60 to 180 days to design a good system which can enable your basic Crowdsourcing. If you plan to have a workflow, approval, wiki or any fancy stuff then the time could be even more. Or in Crowdsourcing spirit you can outsource this to a company who is specialising in doing just the sites for Crowdsourcing. This will also help you save time and effort and also benefit from the experience of previous campaigns.

a) I suggest you create a new URL for the campaign and promote it with minimum of your branding or marketing material.
b) Avoid same look and feel for subsequent campaigns.
c) Make sure your online avenue for Crowdsourcing campaign has excellent up time and the URL works even after the campaign is over.

How would you take care of IP and confidentiality?

There is lot to learn from the processes your organisation has put up to deal with contract work, partnership or the outsourcing. The main point is the ability to segregate what cannot get out of the building and what can. Apply the same principles for Crowdsourcing.

a) Break down your purpose into smaller chunks. Crowdsource for one or more of these chunks which has biggest potential to benefit as per discussion around first point on “Purpose” above.
b) Think if your competition puts up such a Crowdsourcing challenge, will you benefit from it?. If the answer is “No” then most probably it is safe to make it public. Don’t forget that we are only taking about the challenge to be in public domain, the responses are anyway protected and only authorised persons can see it.
c) If responses could have IP involved then clearly state in your challenge how the IP will be handled. 

How would you get the desired results?

Yes the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If you are a fairly big company then starting with your employees could be a good option. Requesting them to share it with their personal network is a big no no. If they do it on their own then consider you have put up a pretty interesting campaign.

a) Test on a sample user base to see if participants understand what you are after?
b) Decide on reward which is proportionate to your organization stature, purpose you are trying to accomplish, effort someone would put in to response and above all benefit you would receive because of a good response.
c) Use social networking enablers and professional Crowdsourcing vendors like ideaken to get desired results.

Finally remember - It takes patience and a little bit of experimentation to achieve consistent results in Crowdsourcing.  Try out different campaigns and develop metrics to measure the benefits from your crowdsourcing initiative.

Happy Crowdsourcing!

Why talk about Implicit Crowdsourcing?

Basically to showcase that seemingly unsuspected things have Crowdsourcing involved, and if you can develop an eye for it then you might be able to come up with better usage of Crowdsourcing for your business.

The Crowdsourcing based business or a project is comparatively easy to detect, but it is amazing that there exist many trivial but interesting examples all around us which has Crowdsourcing embedded. The influence might vary for each case; however they might open your minds to rather interesting possibilities. 

Scene 01:

You decide to learn a new language.  You searched on Google and zeroed in on one website. You had a great experience in learning a new language. At the end of it, to your surprise you might as well have contributed in translating
digital text for businesses.  

Implicit Crowdsourcing at play:

The language learners also help to translate digital text for businesses for other clients.  For example – if say 50 people guess that the word “pelota” in Spanish means “ball” in English then Duolingo assumes that it is correct.  Duolingo has more than 250,000 active language learners – so you can guess the “intelligence” it has acquired through Crowdsourcing.

Scene 02: 

A leading news daily posted an article online on their website with a title “Vivekananda balls to boost Modi campaign “.  I glanced over it and said to myself, they need better editors and I moved on. It could have been some journalist’s way to sensationalize the article or just a genuine oversight.
When the article went in press for a print edition the next day, the news title did not have the obvious issue and was changed to “Vivekananda volleyballs to spike up Modi campaign”.  I checked back the online version and it was changed there as well.

Implicit Crowdsourcing at play:

Within hours of publishing the article online, unlike me, many readers objected and commented on the online article. The news daily took a note of it. The news business is typically one way traffic, and reader’s feedback is usually on general public or parties covered in the article. Here you see a business case for media to formalise incorporation of such feedback before they reaches wider audience.

Scene 03:

There was this interesting page doing rounds in a South American city. Simply compare randomly selected two faces and tell if they match or not, and get paid for it.

Implicit Crowdsourcing at play:

This case is an attempt to locate the offenders in the mob video captured by an amateur. Authorities asked several citizens to assert if the individual pictures match with randomly selected images of their citizens, but they did it without telling the background story. Such Implicit Crowdsourcing with undisclosed agenda, however has to face moral questions (and for the right reason) if it is right to get work done w/o revealing the end purpose.
In another similar example, authorities at UK uploaded 2000+ images of rioters from London in 2011 and asked people to identify them.
 
Scene 04:

You are surfing the web and at one of the sites, you entered a captcha validation (where you need to see the picture and key in the letters to prove you are human and not a machine). And you went on with your surfing life.

Implicit Crowdsourcing at play:

Well, you just made a valuable contribution to digitizing an old precious book. One of the two words in the captcha image was scanned from the heritage book that they want digitized. And in case you are wondering how the website knows if the words you typed is correct or not, and if they already know then why they need digitise again. The trick is they always use a set of two words, one of them is known to them, and that is the only one used for validation. The second word you typed in is your contribution to digitise a book. You can see how a entire book can get digitised one word at a time.

This list can go on and we will share more examples like these in the coming months. And you too can send us instances you spotted.

These examples might trigger ideas on how you can utilize Crowdsourcing for your own business. 

ideaken can help you Crowdsourcing challenge based problems or a scenario where wisdom of crowds can make a difference for your business.