With regards to not being able to please everyone – just think of how many successful businesses started up by selecting a niche/small segment of the consumers and worked to satisfy their needs specifically – only to then find out that niche represented the real opportunity in the market. In many ways – by trying to serve everybody in some way, you end up serving nobody well.

Thanks for the comment!

There’s a famous quote from Henry Ford: “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse”.

I also like to remind people of the Starbucks example. You never would have gotten customers to tell you, “we want to pay four dollars for a cup of coffee”.

In each case you have to answer the timeless question that all people external to your company ask themselves before interacting with your company:

“What’s In It For Me?”

For some, notably big consumer brands, engaging current consumers is not much of a problem – take the Starbucks My Ideas site that taps into thousands if not millions of highly caffeinated and motivated consumers who want to submit their ideas for how Starbucks should be improving their services to better suit a brand that’s become an active part of their lives. Of course, if you look at the ideas themselves, they are almost entirely incremental ideas/opinions/or cries to bring back services, products, and quirks that Starbucks no longer offers or is discontinuing. Whilst I would consider the program a failure in terms of really driving any significant change/benefit to Starbucks, it is a success on the engagement front. Of course, there are few companies who can rally that kind of broad support for their program with minimal incentives.

For many companies though, engaging their customers requires some level of intrinsic reward and recognition program. The further out you go up the “unhappiness scale” (and the further away from your core customer you go) – you typically need to utilize more extrinsic incentives for participation.

For example, take companies like my current clients Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt with their Global Idea Challenge, or Cisco’s I-Prize – both of whom incorporate large scale cash incentives to bring in and engage people and teams who wouldn’t normally engage with the company, and to ask for them to engage in a deeper fashion (by submitting full-on business cases, and value creating ideas for example).

Does that answer your question?

However, some of the large multinationals that market themselves as innovation leaders have some of the most bureaucratic systems I have ever come across – Yes, they have a suggestion box – Yes, they send their individuals on basic Innovation Management courses…

When Frank in the technical department comes up with a great idea – he gets pushed aside as the R&D for the idea is too ‘time consuming’ or ‘costly’ – but actually means that it has to be brought before 16 different line managers, 3 financial managers, seven 185 page documents have to be submitted – and of course the ever present legal team.

If the so called ”Open Business Revolution’ is to really kick off, it is top level management that needs to streamline the system so that individuals or teams are easily able to present their ideas to the ivory tower.

A good example of the open business revolution is in the .com industry – Google, Facebook etc.

I like your reframing as perhaps businesses needing to be more open rather than just focusing on “open innovation.” That’s a very powerful thought, and judging from the comment threads, definitely lends itself to having an open discussion. Thanks for opening this space for discussion!

How does the Google idea of allowing employees to do as they please for some fraction of their time enter into what you mean? I don’t know whether it is a result of the unusual quality of the Google employees, but that idea seems to be extremely successful.

Mary-Anne, although I appreciate your comments and the time taken to eloquently put out your argument, I’m not entirely sure we’re talking about the same topic – my post was referring more to the influx of social input into companies, not the general pervasiveness of commercialism in today’s consumer environment – regardless, thank you for your comments.

John – love your overview of the requirements for motivating and engaging broad and diverse participants. I would maybe amend the need to integrate online with face to face as a nice-to-have rather than as a “need” – look at some of the higher profile tweet chats (#smchat and #innochat are my favourites) as proof that one can exist without the other if the incentive to take part (in this case shared learning and a chance to debate ideas with fellow practitioners) is strong enough.

I love that MITRE’s always trying out new tools and technologies (including Spigit ) – so I’m hardly surprised that you’re looking at virtual trade shows – assume you’re working with one of the main vendors such as Unisfair? My own personal feelings around virtual trade shows (and I add the disclaimer that I’ve only ever had demos of this kind of technology, and have yet to actually attend/hold a virtual conference) – is that the technology, whilst cool looking, kind of gets in the way of the task at hand. Having a second-life like environment doesn’t make you/your ideas any more visible than a standard avatar and a well constructed ideation tool. I’m not sure I understand how this would spawn unlikely partnerships and solutions any more so than any other option either. Surely the driver for all kinds of interactions to emerge derive from the questions/challenges you ask rather than just the medium?

The advantage I do see you getting from using this kind of environment though is one of “uniqueness” – you essentially have an entertainment factor that differentiates you from the world of web pages that most people live in day in/day out (and in doing so, you engage a core game dynamic) – whilst that may lead to a short term lift in engagement (until the novelty wears off), I don’t see it aiding the process of innovation and collaboration in any long term fashion personally.

Would love to see the system you’re building though – as you know, am always interested in the leading edge, and MITRE’s always pushing that!

MITRE’s innovation brokering research is evolving to an even more open or visible paradigm. We found that to motivate broad and diverse participants, you need an on-line capability that is easy to register and use, topics that are relevant and compelling, and features that add value, such as matching people to people, ideas to ideas and people to ideas. You also need to integrate on-line tools with face-to-face events to build trust and reputation. You need diverse incentives. But most of all, to collaborate, you need to be visible. So, we are trying to leverage an open ecosystem of participants by engaging in a virtual trade show. We pose challenges and encourage participants to submit visible ideas at the level of information that they provide on their company web site or at trade shows, except that it is focussed on our challenge. This spawns otherwise unlikely partnerships and solutions, as well as revised needs and challenges. It also enables us to “clear the brush” of irrelevant ideas. Once the first bar is reached, then the participants have the option of responding privately to us, under NDA if preferred. We are just kicking off this new approach. Your thoughts?