Long tail innovation in internal crowds - hidden dream teams in your organiza...
Collaborative Online Ideations Drive Innovation
1. GOING SOCIAL WITH
COLLABORATIVE ONLINE IDEATIONS
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Frank Hatzack
Innovation Office Presented at
Novozymes R&D FEI’13
fhat@novozymes.com Copenhagen
@frankhatzack March 4th, 2013
2. ABOUT NOVOZYMES
Novozymes is the world leader in bioinnovation.
Our business is industrial enzymes, microorganisms
and biopharmaceutical indgredients.
We provide business-to-business biological solutions used
in the production of numerous products such as biofuels,
detergents, feed and crops.
Key figures (2012)
Employees: 5800
Turnover: 11.2 billion DKK
Patents: 6500
Listed on Copenhagen Stock Exchange (NZYB)
Visit us at www.novozymes.com
3. OUR STORY IN A NUTSHELL
2011
Collaborative Online Ideation
(COLIN) was started in R&D
to find growth bets
Why was the first COLIN in
2012 R&D succesful?
Success in R&D triggered fast
adoption by other parts of Why was adoption fast?
Novozymes
What did we learn here?
5. 1ST LESSON : IT IS ABOUT PEOPLE, NOT SOFTWARE
"IF YOU WANT TO BUILD A SHIP,
DON'T DRUM UP PEOPLE TO
COLLECT WOOD AND DON'T
ASSIGN THEM TASKS AND
WORK,
BUT RATHER TEACH THEM TO
LONG FOR THE ENDLESS
IMMENSITY OF THE SEA."
ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPÉRY
6. OR IN OTHER WORDS…
CULTURE EATS
STRATEGY FOR
BREAKFAST!
Intensively discussed during:
7. FACTORS OF SUCCESS
Strategic alignment
Timing
Mobilization Crowd diversity
SIMPLICTIY Company culture
Capacity to absorb
Robustness
Familiarity
12. MOBILIZING CROWDS BY COMBINING
TELEPRESENCE WITH ONLINE IDEATION
We joined 6 global locations, spanning 10 hours of time difference to kick-start an online
ideation campaign. The face-to-face ‘live’ experience had a clear mobilizing effect – at zero
travel costs!
22. COMPANY CULTURE IS CRITICAL FOR
MOBILIZED DIVERSITY
INNOVATION
CROWD
composition MOBILIZATION
external extrinsic COMPANY
culture
motivators CULTURE
23. COMPANY CULTURE
PEOPLE
VALUES
NURSING
CONTINUITY
SENSITIVITY
Social algorithms are changing the world and we are just starting to understand how to work with them in the corporate context.It is obvious that social technologies enable people to connect, to share relevant knowledge with each other. That in itself is a great and boosts organizations’ ability to spread best practice and to build networks. But it also seems that a lot of these value creating connections and moments(!) arise more or less randomly, and that maximized and sustained value capture requires much more than the mere ability to connect people and knowledge. Full value capture requires linking social technologies to: strategy, culture, skills and business processes. The presented case of fast adoption of collaborative online ideations in Novozymes is an example of how the application of a new ‘social’ innovation tool can lead to tangible and valuable results *IF* the strategic and cultural context is right. Moreover, success is only possible if the new tool and its use (process) is compatible and synergistic with existing business processes and (innovation) skills.
Rapid spread of COLIN as an innovation tool in Novozymes. Innovation Office was driving 4 campaigns in R&D during 2011/12 (‘push adoption’), whereas other functional areas outside R&D started to adopt use of the tool for their own purposes (‘pull adoption). Most campaigns involved particitpants across functions and sites/regions to maximise diversity.
Strategic directives will fail to create results unless they resonate with the underlying culture. Culture = sum of behaviours and mindsets.
Dark panel: ‘Generic’ and obvious success factors. Green panel: success factors which surfaced and become more clear as a result of our research on obtained online datasets
The NOSCO user interface is designed in a simple fashion for easy user adoption. The number of features which new users have to learn is very limited. Many users will recognize similarities to popular social media such as Linked-In, Facebook or Twitter. Robustness: In a global organization where a variey of local browser settings might occur it is important that the clowd-hosted platform functions in a robust / reliable fashions for all users.
The rapid adoption of collaborative online ideations was possible because – in essence - we added only three new process steps to an existing step sequence (dark green). Each of the process steps was enabled by a corresponding skill-set which was built and propagated over the years in our organization. Without that pre-existing process and skill set on how to systematically assess new ideas we would probably not have had the same success. The existing processes and skills secured the necessary CAPACITY to ABSORB the creativity unleashed.
Outcomes are described only qualitatively because of content confidentiality.
Culture needs to be permissive to innovation and empowering. It also must embrace DIVERSITY of knowledge, skills and backgrounds.
Maria’s thesis is a systematic account and statistical analysis of our first collaborative online ideation dataset – focusing on DIVERSITY and its implication on idea developmentItis a widespread gut feeling that diversity boosts innovation – but relatively few scientific papers are providing substantiating evidence. Ourpaperrecentlyaccepted in Research-Technology Management is authored by Giancarlo Lauto, Maria Carlsen, Frank Hatzack and Finn Valentin.
Diversity as measured on the dimensions of participant’s geographical & organizatorial placement, seniority, and rank is significantly and postitively corrrelated with idea quality (i.e. wether an idea ended up in the top 25 group). The significance levels of diversity measured on (a.) idea inventors level and (b) commentator level are different. This is explained by the fact that the obervation sample sizes (number of inventors) and number of commentators was very different: Higher number of commenting observations results into higher significance levels in Fisher’s exact test.
So the implications of her findings are: Diversity seems to matter al lot in order to achieve high-quality ideas in on-line ideations. It follows that DIVERSITY has a VALUE in its self, DIVERSITY can be seen as an ASSET – which needs to be optimized to increase result quality. It also follows that OPTIMIZATION of diversity comes at a cost: diversity needs to be created and managed well to achieve the optimal outcome.
Nooteboom et al. puts Maria’s findings into a theoretical context: The concept-terms cogninitive distance (= what Maria calls diversity) and absorbtive capacity are key. Again: this interrelation between the two seems intuitive but Maria’s findings provide quantitivate evidence which is in accordance with the findings of Nooteboom et al.
Face to face ideations are often quite expensive and time consuming exercises – especially if they involve travelling and accommodation expenses. So, cost of diversity in this context tends to be high.Furthermore, F2F ideationsare scenarios of ‘forcedcreativity’ whichwork for certainpersonalities but not for (many) others.
Costs associated with online ideations are on average significantly lower than those of face-2-face – even taking into account the vendor’s fee for using the online platform. On top, they allow engagement of far bigger and diverse crowds. The major limiting factor is – again – absorptive capacity: how many new ideas can a screen team absorb? When is a screen team’s capacity to recognize the few great winning ideas overwhelmed by sheer numbers of ideas & comments? And finally, how many new ideas is the organization able and willing to accommodate as new projects?In contrast to F2F ideations, online ideations represent scenarios of *voluntarycreativity*: it is entirely up to the individual participant when to engage, how long to engage and with whom to engage in the virtual crowd. The fact that online campaigns can run for days and weeks give people the option to become inspired and let ideas ‘sink in’ before they comment and post their own. This can lead to much more original and better articulated ideas.
As a campaign manager, you have 100% control over the composition of your crowd. However, you have far less control (or no influence at all!) on factors such as external culture, extrinsinc motivators or company culture. This is why it is so important to build deep insight into your organization’s culture: the mindsets and expected behaviours of people in the context of the planned online campaign. Building that insight requires meticulous preparation and dialogue with the network of stakeholders and participants *before* launching a campaign.
It takes years and years to build a company culture which is embracing innovation, empowerment and diversity. In the dawning era of collaborative processes and social business technologies the prevailing culture is likely to become a key enabling asset.
