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Cultural Shift to Openness

Dec-07-10 By Aminda
A notable study is being launched out of  Spain’s National Research Council. Titled, “The Cultural Economy of Innovation”, the three-year research project aims to study from a critical and interdisciplinary perspective the current emergence of openness as a figure of, and configurative framework for, the socio-economic structure of our contemporary. It will study the cultural economy of openness as a new sociological paradigm: What contexts and processes legitimate and enable the circulation of openness as a cultural category across organisations, institutions and communities?

The Next Generation of Openness

Dec-06-10 By Aminda
In contemplating the societal shift that the practice of openness has created over the past two decades, it’s hard not to think about what this means for the future. Two current generations, “The Millennials” (born somewhere between the late 70’s and late 90’s) and “The Net Generation” (born since then) will have been raised completely in this increasingly open, innovative society. They haven’t had to purchase anything from a camera to a car without the aid of hundreds of user reviews and opinions. They don’t know life without mass product customization from retailers from Nike to Café Press. And if they’re not designing the product themselves, it’s completely normal for them to be fully engaged in providing input into retailers’ product inventory thanks to online stores such as Threadless and ModCloth.
Here are some other examples of how life is different for these generations.

Capitalizing on Internal Crowdsourcing Part 2

Dec-05-10 By Aminda
Business leaders are making a shift in employee communication. While the traditional survey, task force and town hall meetings may still have their place, sophisticated intranet systems are offering a new way for employees to participate in making decisions on issues that affect them. Internal crowdsourcing presents an intriguing new way to efficiently bring together employees from across functions to provide input on how an employer can most effectively boost employee satisfaction levels.
 
In a previous post we discussed some tips to help start building the foundation for an effective crowdsourcing initiative. Key to getting off to a great start is timing and project selection. Once the project is underway, here are some tips for helping it run smoothly and generate the desired results.
 

Nike Keeps Making Strides

Dec-03-10 By Aminda
This week, Nike, Inc. made an internal design tool publicly available to the rest of the apparel design and retail community. The Environmental Apparel Design Tool evaluates waste, energy, toxics and water in materials and manufacturing, enabling companies to affect the most significant components of a product’s environmental impact. It has been used internally for four years at Nike after a seven-year, six million dollar investment to design and build the software-based tool.
 
“By releasing the tool we want others to improve on it and we hope to inspire further collaboration to create global industry standards for a level playing field, encourage widespread industry adoption of sustainable design practices and have more sustainable products available for the consumer.” said Hannah Jones, Vice President of Nike Sustainable Business and Innovation.

Plan Your Most Innovative Year Yet

Dec-02-10 By Aminda
With the end of the year rapidly approaching it’s a great time to start thinking ahead, setting goals and committing to education, networking and other ways to keep up the momentum of your innovation efforts.  To help you with those plans, here is calendar of the major Innovation conferences and events to be held around the world in 2011. One of these might be just what you need!
 








24-26 January, 2011
CoDev, Scottsdale Arizona
At the TENTH annual conference on Co-Development and Open Innovation: Accessing Networks & Knowledge to Create Business Value you can expect to hear from and network with top open innovation thought leaders and advanced practitioners across multiple industries on questions that are challenging early open innovation adopters.

Capitalizing on Internal Crowdsourcing

Dec-01-10 By Aminda
A recent report on internal communications from UK-based Melcrum Publishing shares the findings of a company who asked all 100,000 of their workers 'what percentage of your intellectual capital do you use'. The results found that 70 percent of staff felt that only 15 to 20 percent of their intellectual capital was being used. 15 to 20 percent! How many other large corporations would find similar results? Probably a lot. Yet in a competitive business environment employers can’t afford to pay their staff 100 percent only to get 15 percent in return.
Fortunately, crowdsourcing practices offer some fresh ways to extract unused intellectual capital from within organizations. Here are some tips on how to build a solid foundation for utilizing this tool effectively.

New Social Network Based on Crowdsourcing

Nov-30-10 By Aminda
"Power the crowd." That’s the slogan for evly.com, the first social network designed to launch new products, do market research, find funding and basically solve anything using the crowd. The site does so by enabling users to create and support custom web businesses, manage both open and closed networks, the ability to grow a network based around a particular interest or need and to integrate with other social media platforms.

Walmart Uses Crowdsourcing to Connect with Consumers, Contribute to a Cause

Nov-29-10 By Aminda
As part of its 2010 holiday giving initiative, Walmart and the Walmart Foundation have pledged $18 million to fight hunger in the U.S.  They will be using Facebook to engage and educate consumers about the program, allowing U.S. consumers to vote on which cities should receive $1.5 million in grants to fight hunger.  Between November 15 and December 31 participants can "like" a community on Facebook, selecting from 100 communities where hunger rates are the highest.  The city with the most support will receive $1 million in grants and the next five cities with the highest support will receive $100,000 each.

The Netherlands Knows How to Innovate

Nov-27-10 By Aminda
November 29 kicks off the third and largest Open Innovation Festival bringing together Dutch communities. According to the event’s website, the festival aims to innovate the public domain in order to showcase how governmental organizations, the profit sector and knowledge institutions can cooperate. Furthermore, it aims at showing that by working together we will create a more effective, more efficient and better government. The central theme of OIF2010 is working in communities.

Maximizing Your Open Innovation Project

Nov-25-10 By Aminda
A classic business leadership story tells of Tom Watson Jr.’s, former head of IBM, meeting with a Vice President who had lost $10 million on a failed experiment. The VP came into the meeting fully expecting to be reprimanded and fired. Instead, Watson asked “why would we want to lose you when we’ve just given you a $10 million education?”

Most leaders will agree that there are plenty of benefits to developing a culture of risk-taking and by fostering an environment where employees are not afraid of failure. However, those same people will probably also agree that they’d prefer that ideas be tested thoroughly enough that they fail early on rather than after sinking significant time and resources into them.

If your organization has been considering utilizing open innovation to solve a business problem but are concerned that it might be too risky, here are some questions to ask yourself.