Public Question
Open Innovation
Open Innovation lies in create the right environment to produce effective content outside of your traditional scope (company). The environments could be on and off-line, but according to your experience: What is the best way to engage and encourage participants of an open innovation community to actively participate (Specifically, Two targets entrepreneurs and consumers)?
Public unpaid question.
Shaun Harris
I am leading strategy around open innovation and co-creation at Marriott and we've seen engagement spike when you link innovation contributions to in-market execution or testing.
We've tested both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards and have found that extrinsic rewards like a cash prize help attract people to the innovation challenge. Intrinsic rewards like, your concept might actually LIVE in a hotel experience, tend to fuel passion and a more thoughtful construction of a concept or idea. Like any creator, the goal is to impact the world we live in and being able to brag about personal impact is a major badge of honor today.
I also feel the distinction between an entrepreneur and consumer is becoming less defined as it relates to open innovation. I don't believe consumers are as passive as they once were. In my opinion, entrepreneurial thinking is a practice shared well beyond a community of entrepreneurs.
Above all else, focus on open innovation challenges that have the budget, resources, and support to implement the good ideas. If it's just an exercise I'm not sure how long the community will want to participate.
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BJ Cook
Some good answers so far. Whether you're a brand trying to engage consumers by participating in some type of "crowdsourcing" or a company working with entrepreneurs to develop the next hottest product; the mechanism by which you facilitate this journey and the expectations you set are most important. For consumers, it's really being heard. They want that validation and want it to be authentic, so pick your mechanism that provides the most transparency. For entrepreneurs, provide them with some type of ownership during the process, but clearly communicate the risks and rewards that are inherent with sharing their ideas.
Emily Lutzker
The equation is more than two targets -- entrepreneurs and consumers -- it is everyone. Because the best open innovation outreach is worldwide, tapping into cultures and groups that are outside the normal scope of the closed innovation process. The key is having both the companies and the innovators benefit from the process. The benefits can be money or recognition or fun on the innovators side, and on the corporation side, it is getting concepts and inspiration that are unique and viable.
It's a hard balance. We are trying to achieve it at OpenInvo.
Lourenço Bustani
There is no one answer for this question. There are many different types of crowdsourcing efforts out there suited for different purposes. Depending on the level of engagement that you want how public you want to be, and the end purpose behind it, there are different mechanisms to engage and reward. There are loads of case studies online about companies and their crowdsourcing efforts (Starbucks, Lego, Doritos, Proctor & Gamble, among many others). You can pick and choose what works based on these stories.
All I can say off the bat is that entrepreneurs and consumers will need to be treated very differently, for all the obvious reasons.
Another important thing to distinguish is crowdsourcing for product development (P&G) vs. communications (Doritos).
