Social networking for innovators

August 13, 2010New collaboration and strategic innovation toolsdeveloped by European researchers will help fast-track creative ideas bynetworking the most competent people to tackle the job.
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Like gold prospectors, companies are willing to go to theends of the earth to find innovative ideas; and like gold prospectorsthey often grow old looking.
For all its importance,innovationremains a fundamentally mysterious process, often the outcome ofunexpected Eureka moments. It is crucial to competitiveness and itpropels the world’s leading companies, but ultimately the reasons why orhow it happens often depend on who you talk to.
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Some experts point to creative workplaces, while others citeincentive schemes. Still others look to determined recruitment among thebest and the brightest, while another faction claims that inspirationshould be fostered in the workforce.
While one group might prescribe a directionless quest, others insiston a deliberate structure, like old-timers who swear that panning forgold leads to more lucky strikes than mining.
What all of them have in common is that they would like to discoveror unlock a simple process to strike gold reliably, and often.
Collaboration 2.0
Meanwhile, every other sector of the corporate world, from resourceplanning to circulating memos, has its software tools, but innovationhas had to make do with pencils and napkins as its primary supports.There is a certain romance to all this but corporate life is focused onresults. Those results are now here.
EU-funded project Laboranova sought to develop a platform that wouldprovide tools to help companies generate ideas, collaborate and evaluateprojects and foster an innovation community and culture within acompany.
“Very early on in the process we realised that a single platformcould never properly support all possible innovation pathways,” revealsDarren Morrant of EurExcel, the exploitation manager of the project.
“In fact, the project itself became a bit like a laboratory for theinnovation process. We tried different formats and approaches togenerate ideas for useful innovation support tools, and what wediscovered was surprising.”
In short, there is no innovation process, but there are many possiblepathways in the fuzzy front-end of innovation. The aim is to helppeople come up with ideas and then to support them in all sorts of waysso that they can develop on them, he suggest. “We found that differentapproaches suit different needs, different companies and differentsituations.”
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Innovation suite
So rather than build an innovation platform, Laboranova chose todevelop a suite of innovation tools that could work together or alone.“In this way, people can pick and choose the most useful tools forwhatever they are trying to do,” he stresses.
Once Laboranova developed a flexible attitude to generating anddeveloping ideas, they started to crop up all the time. In the end, theteam elaborated over 18 concepts and developed 10 core tools.
“Some concepts never got beyond the idea stage, some got a littledevelopment, but as time progressed and we worked through what we coulddo and what impact it could have, we settled on 10 key programmes thatcould respond to five innovation phases we identified.”
The broad innovation phases were innovation games, which fostercreative thinking, representational tools for presenting ideas indifferent media, support tools for the core programs, like mash-ups,which can combine different core programs in a single interface. Thefinal two topics were evaluation and community tools for sharing andcollaboration.
RefQuest, for example, is an innovation game. The game engine workswith game objects, so the software can be adapted to any aspect of abusiness - whether players want to look at a process or develop a newproduct - and the game introduces ‘disruptive idea generation’ usingapplied creativity, like lateral thinking and other techniques.
Once ideas are generated, they need to be represented or cataloguedin some way and two tools; InnoTube and Melodie fulfil this role.InnoTube is like a private YouTube for businesses, where users canupload content that others can subscribe to, or comment on. It has beenused by Lucent to poll alumni on their experience at Lucent’seducational institute.
Wisdom of crowds
Melodie, on the other hand, creates visual maps of a range of ideas,like a MindMap. Users can comment or enlarge on ideas, and similar ideasare grouped close together. It provides an instant visual layout ofmultiple solutions to solving a particular problem.
Evaluation is the next phase of the innovation process. For this,Laboranova developed a program called Idem. It contains an ideageneration element, or ideas can be imported from other tools. Itsgreatest strength, however, lies in its role as a stock market for goodideas. It also incorporates user comments, ratings and aggregation ofusers’ preferences to support the selection of ideas.
It is a powerful way to unlock the wisdom of crowds, a theory thatdemonstrates how a large number of non-specialists, or even the generalpublic, often make better choices than individual experts. The fourthphase focuses on developing an innovation community, through tools likeGreatLinks.
“GreatLinks came as a complete surprise to me,” reveals Morrant. “It’s just such a useful tool.”
It unlocks the power of social bookmarking and applies it to theenterprise. Social bookmarking allows people to share their favouritelinks, and acts like a reviewing system with the entire internetrecruited to help out.
GreatLinks takes this concept and applies it to the enterprise. Ifusers are researching a particular topic, they can rate links in aGoogle search. Other users can rank search results based on theseratings. The system also allows comments, can link to experts on a giventopic within the company, provides a private blogging platform, and canrate and support document sharing.
Innovation gold dust
The final phase in Laboranova’s innovation scheme is support for thevarious tools. Mash-up, for example, can combine the different key toolsinto one, unified interface so users can see all elements in one look.
For example, if a team is using RefQuest, GreatLinks and Melodie, themash-up program can unify them into a single interface. This way,companies can develop thetool set that most suits their culture and their needs.
In all, it is an impressive body of work, and reaction to the toolswas very positive when they were tested at companies like Fiat, Lucentand L’Oreal. Efforts are now underway to commercialise certain parts ofthe work and add other parts to existing software. For example, AgilentTechnologies is marketing GreatLinks.
It means that the process of innovation finally has software dedicated to helping companies strike gold more often.
More information:http://cordis.euro … u/ictresults
Provided by ICT Results (news :web)