I am very excited to share with you this video interview between InnoCentive CTO David Ritter and Bill Laberis, Editorial Director and Social Media Manager, Custom Solutions Group, IDG.  This discussion focuses on the important role that CIOs and other IT leaders should play in the implementation of a company’s innovation strategy.

In the interview, David talks about how investing in collaboration tools, social networks and idea management platforms is usually insufficient to truly improve innovation. Disjointed efforts usually elicit no tangible results, and often create information noise – indecipherable data – making it difficult to aggregate, rationalize and analyze. Instead he argues for a Challenge-driven innovation approach that will complement existing strategies and investments in social networking and collaboration.

This program is filled with insightful learnings, experiences and best practices that you can use right away! Have a look!

Introduced in 2008, InnoCentive@Work is the fast, easy and cost-effective way to harness the collective intellectual power of your best and brightest people. It provides an open forum where everyone in your organization is encouraged to collaborate on your most pressing organizational challenges via a secure, easy-to-use web-based portal. It rewards individuals from anywhere in your company for their contributions toward solving your most pressing problems. And it gives you the ability to unleash breakthrough innovations designed to drive growth and profitability – in less time and for less money than you ever thought possible.

Since InnoCentive@Work employs a Software-as-a-Service model, we can get your organization trained and your open collaborative environment up and running in as little as 90 days.

Step One – InnoCentive’s technology team works with you to integrate and configure InnoCentive@Work to operate through your intranet. At the same time, our Client Services team helps define the scope of your program, train your organization, and establish internal policies for integrating open innovation into your existing processes.

Step Two – InnoCentive helps you create and prioritize a pipeline of pressing problems and establish a process for approving Challenges, reviewing submissions, and using rewards to motivate participation. We even help Challenge owners or Seekers write the Challenge text to be posted on the InnoCentive@Work website.

Step Three – We educate internal Innovation Champions to help exploit the full power of the InnoCentive@Work process. These Champions ensure that the Challenges your team is collaborating on are aligned with your organization’s strategic priorities.

Step Four – InnoCentive supports you on an ongoing basis to continually balance your need for innovating internally with the potential of tapping into external resources to increase the diversity of

your Solver base through InnoCentive.com.

Think inside out.

Once you have established an open environment and shifted your organization’s cultural perspective on sharing ideas and innovations, it’s easy to extend your innovation initiatives and move your Challenges outside the walls – from InnoCentive@Work to The InnoCentive Challenge Center on InnoCentive.com.

We’ll work with your Seekers to anonymize and redefine their internal Challenges for public disclosure – where they can be solved by any of the 200,000+ members of InnoCentive’s global Solver network. So you will have some of world’s best and brightest minds working to help you design a better product, create a life-saving medical breakthrough, or make life better for millions.

Earlier this summer, we released InnoCentive@Work 3 which allows customers to engage and collaborate even more broadly by connecting with their external communities of customers, consultants and partners, thereby creating newer communities of potential Solvers and increasing the likelihood of finding breakthrough solutions that yield measurable business results.  InnoCentive@Work 3 is built for flexibility: it adapts to the community’s optimal style of working and collaborating, allowing Solver teams to define the voting and rating rules of their group.   Read more about InnoCentive@Work 3 in this interview with InnoCentive CTO David Ritter.

Don’t just take our word for it.  In a commissioned study announced earlier this year, Forrester Consulting found that a large, multinational agricultural company achieved a return on investment (ROI) of 182%, with a payback period of less than two months, by deploying InnoCentive@Work along with InnoCentive Challenges and OnRAMP to facilitate innovation in their R&D organization.  See the study here.

Participation and engagement in SAP’s online communities has exploded over the last few years.  There are now 1.3 million members in the SAP Developer Network (SDN).  Several other related communities span an additional 500,000+ members.  Taken together as the “SAP Community Network”, this ecosystem is actively helping to  shape SAP’s agenda and success.  Many members are employees at major SAP customers and partners.  The leaders in these communities have a strong voice – on SAP’s site and through their own independent blogs and networks.  It’s been great to have a chance to share our model and vision with them and listen to their input and questions.

Here are some quick takeaways from the event so far:

• Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, opened the festivities with some bold thoughts on collaboration.  He rightly claimed that Wikipedia and other examples have proven that “collaboration at scale can work”.  He further asserts that essential to unlocking the power of communities is an “assumption of benevolence” in the contributors.  When we eat in a restaurant, everyone has a knife.  But we don’t assume therefore that the other diners are going to use their knives to stab us.  This ideas validate our experience at InnoCentive, where Seekers and Solvers engage with good faith every day.  Accountability for evil-doers is also necessary, but a healthy community manages problems by exception, and allows the community itself to help identify and solve conflicts.
• SAP has taken a leadership position in identifying a new profession – the Business Process Expert.  SAP’s “BPX” community now numbers 450,000 members. These professionals are often at the center of business transformations, and are key to the successful implementation of IT solutions within enterprises.  They’re also in a great position to see where IT systems have gaps – missing or misaligned capabilities where improvement is needed.  We’re excited to offer this group a new way to find solutions that address these gaps by posting them as Challenges to the combined force of Solvers from both InnoCentive and the SAP Community Network.
• In communities such as SDN and BPX, participants are very often willing to help each other solve simple problems with no incentive other than pure good will or “reward points”.  But more complex problems may require real time and resources to resolve.  From the early response to our announcement, many SAP ecosystem members find InnoCentive Challenges to be a very natural extension of the community model, where significant solutions to bigger problems can be rewarded with a more concrete currency.  As I noted in my previous post, combining the incentives of peer recognition, a sense of personal accomplishment, and good old-fashioned cash creates a dynamic in which problems get solved and value gets created for all participants.

We look forward to our interactions with all aspects of the SAP ecosystem.  Please let us know your thoughts.

If you are an SAP Developer or are reading this blog for the first time today, welcome to the InnoCentive Solver Blog, we’d love to hear from you!