Perspectives on Innovation

Bob Fucci is InnoCentive’s SAP relationship manager. He has been at TechEd in Berlin this week, getting to know the European SAP community.

Greetings from Berlin!  As I write this, TechEd Berlin is wrapping up. The conference was attended by more than 10,000 SAP customers, partners, and prospects.  It’s a great testimony to SAP customer loyalty and the “trusted advisor” status SAP has earned.

It is a very interesting and fluid community. People seem to be trying to foster and develop an atmosphere of creativity and independence while at the same time finding a meaningful contribution to corporate performance. It’s quite interesting to see.

To my surprise, InnoCentive was the only SAP Partner highlighted by both Zia Yusuf and Leo Apothker during their keynote presentations. Both of them talked about the strategic nature of the partnership and urged attendees to visit our booth. SAP also announced that SDN members who register as Solvers will receive SDN points – a significant number of new registrations happened as a result.

At past SAP events, sales and customers drove the direction and the purpose of the discussion. The sales “white space” was filled with partners and the single focus is to sell more to clients. That’s less true at TechEd. The premium is about education – the “white space” is new and different ways to collaborate. It is much more about “individual brands”, personal stories, shared experiences and for InnoCentive the challenge to tap into that and build the story will be critical.

Our partner manager Martin Raepple, from SAP, won a “Top Achiever” award and was recognized in the keynote session. Congratulations Martin. Martin and I also posted a video that helps describe our partnership and our goals going forward.

Overall this event really opened my eyes to the opportunities presented by the partnership, and the enthusiasm of our global SAP audience.  Thanks to my SAP hosts for a terrific week!

Bob

In an excellent posting titled “Building a better collective memory”, Michael Nielsen makes the point that science currently lacks the ‘trust infrastructure’ and incentives necessary for free, unrestricted trading of questions and ideas. Imagine two scientists; each has information that could benefit the other more than it benefits themselves. In an ideal world, they’d exchange this information, and both would be better off. This is the concept of ‘comparative advantage’. Unfortunately, in the real world these scientists:

-Will probably never meet in the first place
-If they should happen to meet, they won’t likely talk about the relevant gaps in their work
-Even if they discuss their needs, they don’t have any basis on which to trust each other enough to engage in collaboration

Michael envisions an ideal “collaboration market” that will enable the open (or at least productive) exchange of ideas. This engendered lots of interesting debate, mostly about why none of the existing collaboration sites, publication archives, and the like are NOT fostering this type of exchange. Since we’ve been thinking about this problem for some time at InnoCentive, I thought I’d share some perspective on what characteristics we believe a collaboration platform needs to be effective.

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I am 50 years old and I live with my wife in our house in a small village in Sweden. Our three children have moved out a few years ago. I am a food chemical engineer with extensive experience in the food manufacturing process like quality control, research, processing and raw material chemistry. .

The first time I came in contact with InnoCentive was when I read a magazine in which there was an article about this new way of doing product developments. Today I do not remember exactly when this was, but I think it was in the beginning when InnoCentive started up.

I became curious about it and went to the homepage to see what it was. I found it very interesting, and the chance to win a great reward if my proposal was chosen, made me shiver. How exciting! A chance to show your competence, work with your brain without limitations and the possibility to compete with others to find the best solution and get money for it! I was directly hooked on the idea and registered as a Solver.

At this time of life I was what you call “fed up” with my work, and wanted to find a new way of developing my personal knowledge and I really needed something which could make my brain “wake up” again. InnoCentive turned out to be this injection! Many times I thought that my employer did not fully use my knowledge and competence in their business. Now suddenly an opportunity popped up for me to let the creative part of my brain operate again and at the same time being able to do the regular work for my employer. This was possible because the InnoCentive work could be done in my spare time after work. An extra hobby work, so to say.

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Liz Moise:
I’m joined by Dr. Karim R. Lakhani, Professor at Harvard Business School. Dr. Lakhani, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. You’ve watched InnoCentive grow for quite a few years now. I’m sure our Solvers may be familiar with your research study, published a few years back. Could you tell me in a few sentences, what your conclusions were on InnoCentive, in that study?

Dr. Karim Lakhani:
I worked with Lars Bo Jeppesen from the Copenhagen Business School along with InnoCentive staff to understand the effectiveness of the problem solving process at InnoCentive.

Most problem solving involves effort by the problem holder to search for the relevant knowledge that will help create an effective and workable solution. However, many studies have shown that this search for knowledge is quite “local,” i.e. problem holders only access knowledge that they are familiar with and rarely do they go outside of their fixed views of the problem or personal knowledge bases. With InnoCentive – the problem holder is actually doing a “broadcast search,” i.e. they broadcast their solution requirements to the whole world – with the hopes of finding someone that has the relevant knowledge that can help create the solution. The problem holder goes from being a problem Solver to a solution seeker.

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Business Week is featuring a recent interview with CEO Dwayne Spradlin as this week’s Innovation of the Week Podcast. Innovation Department editor Reena Jana asks how InnoCentive remains on the cutting edge of innovation. Listen to it here and tell us what you think!