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“Green” is Just Another Color of Innovation!

We posted a blog and press release last week about a great new initiative for Earth Day. Flagpole wants to help companies become more “green” and “sustainable” by offering our innovation software. The program was designed to assist companies that are not currently collecting ideas for Green initiatives and projects to quickly implement a solution for gathering suggestions in this area. We knew that by applying the principles of Open Innovation, companies would find a lot of great ideas for improvement.

The reponse has been great and Flagpole has now implemented such “Green Idea Challenge” sites for some of our existing customers, as well as some brand new organizations that we’ve never worked with before. We’ll be running our contests and “Green Idea Drives” through Earth Day, and some have even chosen to extend the program indefinitely. We couldn’t be more thrilled to be helping companies honor Earth Day by becoming more sustainable.

We look ahead and see another great opportunity for a similar event in the very near future - World Environment Day on June 5. Sanctioned by the United Nations’ Environment Programme, WED is a Global Effort to raise awareness, jumpstart local programs, and motivate folks towards a common Green goal. As Pittsburghers ourselves, MindMatters is proud that our city has been chosen as 2010′s North American Host City and we’ll be putting a lot of effort into special events to honor this important day. More on all that later!

In the mean time, we would like to congratulate the companies that are taking part in our Earth Day initiative. We’re seeing some great Green ideas come in from all over the World and we honestly hope that success continues way beyond Earth Day!

Ben Franklin: Father of Collaborative Problem Solving?

Published March 10, 2010 Best practices , Broadcast Search , Crowd-Sourcing , Feedback , Idea Management , Knowledge Sharing , Open Innovation Leave a Comment
Tags: Innovation, Idea Management, Ideas, Collaboration, ben Franklin, Junto

In some of the most successful companies today, Innovation is constantly being pushed forward by collaborative groups. Whether formally organized or not, teams like this use a variety of tools available to share knowledge in a non-hierachical fashion.

You might call them ‘Communities of Practice’ or even ’Innovation Committees’ at your company, but their function is to meet regularly to openly discuss topics and information germane to their business. The goal is to solve problems through communication and to promote new ideas among the members.

Long before companies recognized and formalized any modern approach to innovation, one American forefather created what is recognized as the very first collaborative group. Benjamin Franklin organized a group called Junto in Philadelphia which consisted of selected people from diverse backgrounds and varying occupations. They met regularly, usually in a tavern, to have discussions and try to solve the political issues of the day. Franklin felt that a braintrust of people with different perspectives would solve more problems faster than any lone individual ever could. The small, dynamic club discussed anything from philosophical questions to community problems, political issues, and business affairs.

Franklin’s Junto obviously didn’t have cool web 2.0 tools or email to faciliate the sharing of knowledge. They did their thing in an open forum that met weekly and listened to eachother speak about mutually agreed-upon topics. The key to their productivity was strong organization and a feeling of equity among its participants. They followed a formal order at meetings in which everyone had the floor to share thoughts in a respectful environment. Does your company do this for it’s employees?

Imagine what you could do with a similar model using the tools available today. That’s what Flagpole’s (www.flagpole-software.com) all about!

You can easily implement a simple, standardized process for sharing ideas and knowledge within your organization. Your “Discussion Topics” will become the ”Challenges” that you share outwardly. Your ”Junto Members” are your employees or coworkers, who will share their unique perspectives to help you build on ideas and solve problems.

Finding New Areas for Innovation

Published February 22, 2010 Business Innovation , Crowd-Sourcing , Customer Satisfaction , Feedback , Knowledge Sharing , Open Innovation Leave a Comment
Tags: Customer Satisfaction, new approach, new areas for innovation, New Ideas

In many companies, innovation is only focused on finding ways to directly improve the product or service they offer. In reality, there are many opportunities to innovate that you may not even be thinking of.

By analyzing the entire breadth of the customer’s interaction with your products, you’ll uncover new strategies for differentiating hidden aspects of your offering from your competitors’. You can begin to do this by asking customers (and employees that interface with customers) key questions like these and analyzing the findings…

How do customers discover their need for your products?
Are customer aware that you can satisfy their need? Do they even know they have a need in the area that your product or service covers? There may be a better way to create the feelings of need or desire for your solution.
How do customers find and purchase your offering?
You may need to make your product easier to search for, find, order, or purchase. Can you make the availability of your product more prominent or your advertising more ubiquitous?
How do customers make their final selection?
Maybe you can find a new way to help your customers narrow down the possibilities, or make it easier or more convenient for them to make a selection in your marketplace.
How is your product or service delivered?
How does it get in the hands of the customer and what happens once it’s there? Can you make this experience better, faster, or less costly for them or you?
What is your customer using your product for?
Can you change or add new ways for them to use (or reuse) your product?
What are the difficult things about using your product?
Can you make this experience better? What are the common Customer support issues? Can you change something to make it easier to use?
How is your product supported or repaired?
Can you change the methods of fixing products or resolving issues? Can you eliminate some problems entirely? Would spending money to change or redesign something now save you a lot in support costs?

These are just SOME of the many areas you can improve by learning more about people’s experiences and interactions with your company’s offerings. It all starts with gathering feedback and interacting with customers and employees. They KNOW what the problems are and they WILL tell you if you ask.

With Flagpole (http://www.flagpole-software.com), you can present questions like these to your audience to get honest responses that could help you innovate in new areas that your competitors aren’t even thinking about.

Build Your Own Innovation Factory

Published February 12, 2010 Best practices , Breakthrough Innovation , Business Innovation , Collaboration & Communities , Crowd-Sourcing , Idea Management , Incremental Innovation , Innovation Process , Invention 1 Comment
Tags: Edison, Incremental Innovation, Innovaiton goals, Innovation, Invention, new Products, Process

When it comes to keeping innnovation and creativity moving in your organization, we can all learn a thing or two from history’s greatest inventor, Thomas Edison. While everyday corporate innovation usually doesn’t entail coming up with new inventions on a regular basis, one can easily draw a few parallels between the prolific inventor’s company and your own business.

Arguably, Edison’s greatest innovation was perhaps not any single invention, but his own laboratory in Menlo Park, NJ. Edison set up an “Innovation Factory” of sorts , which demonstrated that anyone could produce a promising stream of innovations and ideas, if organized and executed correctly.

First he built a process for keeping himself and his workers on track. He created goals that stated that his shop would produce “a minor innvention every 10 days and a major breakthrough every 6 months.”

You could do the same with your business innovations by setting realistic goals for the number and quality of ideas you want to find . Then, implement a tool to help you deliver on it: Issue challenges to your “workers” to drive a constant, but focused flow of ideas through your “factory.”

Another hallmark of Edison’s constant innovation cycle was the fact that he reused (and sometimes re-purposed) good ideas and proven smaller inventions over and over. His phonograph used wiring that he created for telegraphs and an electric motor design that his shop had used in several previous inventions. Good old Thomas wasn’t afraid to blend a few small, already tested elements to create a larger breakthrough concept.

Your organization could do exactly the same thing. By “warehousing” and regularly revisiting “not-ready-for-primetime” ideas that you capture along the way, you’ll begin to identify opportunities for combining two, or maybe several, ideas into larger projects like a breakthrough product or huge time saver.

You don’t need to build a laboratory in New Jersey, though. You can create your very own “Innovation Factory” right now with Flagpole (www.flagpole-software.com). Just set it up, publish your own business challenges, and let your innovators get busy solving problems, submitting ideas, and collaborating right away.

Soon you’ll be meeting your goals of constant innovation. Thomas would be so proud!

Invite Others to Solve Your Problems

Published February 11, 2010 Best practices , Business Innovation , Collaboration & Communities , Crowd-Sourcing , Customer Satisfaction , Feedback , Idea Management , Open Innovation Leave a Comment
Tags: Business Problems, Collaboration, Customer Feedback, Customer Input, Customer Loyalty, Customer Sat, Cutomer Satisfaction, Employee Involvement, Employee Loyalty, Employees, Feedback, Idea Management, Ideas, Innovation, Open Innovation, Open Source, Refund, ROI, Solve Problems, Web tools

Up until recently, the standard formula for most companies to innovate probably consisted of a closed-loop, if not clandestine, team of individuals to brainstorm and develop ideas. While some great projects will undoubtedly come out of this approach, the ‘innovation group’ can only do so much. That fact alone could become a barrier for a very large organization trying to solve a host of internal problems.

In the software arena, of course, there exists the movement of Open Source development. It’s powerful because it invites users themselves to get involved and to essentially become “co-producers” of the products they are consuming. The pride of ownership that comes from seeing the project as “your baby”, and watching it grow and develop, is fulfilling and inspires a sense of loyalty among participants. What if you could do that, in some respect, for your company and its products?

Although Open Source has never become the industry coup some may have predicted, the concept is a strong one that can be applied to other industries: By letting “outsiders” get involved, you’re able to pool the talents and unique experience of the best people you can reach, in addition to the specialists in your own Innovation Team or R&D group.

When companies open up the innovation process, great things start to happen. You increase the likelihood of finding the “good” ideas: the ones that are viable, core to your business, and will produce ROI. Now you’re gathering input from folks that offer unique perspectives on your business – maybe an approach to a problem that your “usual suspects” would never even think of. Finally, and no less importantly, you’re spreading goodwill and increasing loyalty among the participants. Customers continue to buy from companies that understand their wants and needs, and employees need to know that their input is valuable.

Invite others to help solve your problems and contribute to your products with Flagpole (www.flagpole–software.com). Flagpole is an easy-to-implement web tool for gathering ideas and feedback from your audience: employees, product users, partners, and suppliers. Flagpole guarantees that our product will provide you a return on your investment (ROI), or we’ll refund your costs, 100%. We also offer a free version so companies can get started immediately with absolutely no risk.

Research Towards Innovation

Published January 26, 2010 Best practices , Business Innovation , Collaboration & Communities , Crowd-Sourcing , Feedback , Idea Management , Open Innovation , Suggestion Box Leave a Comment
Tags: Business Innovation, Research, Development, Feedback, Voice of the Customer, Customer, Corporate Innovation, needs, r&d, wants, User feedback, users, market research

It is said that the more you know, the more that you can do with what you know. That’s why using research to breed innovation is essential for your business.

A corporate Research & Development department is an extremely important resource, but they typically tend to focus on near-term and short-term opportunities: The day to day improvements, the launch of a new product, the “low-hanging” fruit, as it were. A true research strategy involves a long-term approach and commitment to understanding the ways your market will change over time. In other words, putting research into practice means looking into the future, well beyond your current business model, to find new ways to impact slow and steady growth. This may require road-mapping your business according to new ideas, expert projections, and sometimes even major paradigm shifts.

Unfortunately, research such as this can be both expensive and difficult to perform. Many companies in this economy have been forced to cut spending in every department, and usually one of the first to be affected is the research team. However, a shortsighted decision to save money now by axing research, may truly hurt your business in the long run.

Research does not have to be a huge expense, though. Customer Feedback is an excellent way to gather information, discover trends, and predict the future of your industry. Managed efficiently, it can provide an enormous competitive advantage. By staying in touch with your customers’ wants and needs, you can find out a great deal of knowledge that can be practically applied to your business.

Acquiring feedback can be as simple as launching a web-based tool like Flagpole. Flagpole deploys quickly and creates an easy-to-use sharing ground for ideas and suggestions from your customers. You can directly ask them all the questions you need answered by issuing challenges. Your employees can also participate by submitting their own answers and ideas, and by voting and commenting on those received from your customers. This will begin to build strong and meaningful interactions between your company and your user community. What you gather from these interactions and ideas will undoubtedly help you predict where your market is heading, and where your company needs to be to stay ahead.

To learn more about Flagpole, or to sign up for a completely free version, visit: http://www.flagpole-software.com/price.htm

Stakeholders in your Organization Have Great Ideas – Just Ask Them!

Published December 29, 2009 Best practices , Business Innovation , Collaboration & Communities , Crowd-Sourcing , Feedback , Idea Management , Open Innovation , Suggestion Box Leave a Comment
Tags: Audience, Cloud, Commenting, Crowd-Sourcing, Customer, Employee, Feedback, Idea box, Idea Message Board, lean, Process Improvement, Projects, Voting, Waste reduction, Web, web 2.0

It has been said that 80% of the solutions to your company’s problems already exist in the minds of your employees. Why not ask them?

By implementing a friendly, easy-to-use and interactive space on the web for collecting and nurturing ideas, you will realize a whole new way of solving issues. Who better to offer ideas and suggestions to your company’s most perplexing issues than the folks who work with your organization and product every day? Employees, Customers, Business Partners, Suppliers, Experts – they all have great ideas and they will love telling you (and each other) about them. It’s called “crowd-sourcing your innovation” and it works!

Flagpole Software can help you solicit suggestions and ideas for new products, business improvements, better processes, cost savings, waste reduction, new markets/projects, and just about any other type of innovation, incremental or break-through, your company needs to find. Additionally, by allowing your users to comment and vote on each other’s submissions, you can help reduce the resources needed to find and review new bits of innovation.

Get in touch with Flagpole today and try our new cost-effective web solutions for crowd-sourcing ideas. We even have a free version that can get you started in minutes.

Problems Can be a Good Thing!

Published December 28, 2009 Business Innovation , Crowd-Sourcing , Feedback , Idea Management , Open Innovation Leave a Comment
Tags: Business Problems, Finding solutions, Innovation Process, Solving Problems

You know that “ah-ha” moment that Oprah is always talking about? In business innovation, that is exactly what you are looking for. Finding the best way to evaluate your problem can bring that moment of clarity to life for you.

In your business, the very nature of the problems that you encounter requires the ability to consider many different points of view, opinions and personalities. Your customer, employees and the marketplace all have different considerations such as what they want, needs or simply desire and the constraints that come along with all of those things. If you are dealing with complex problems, your solutions will come to you when you have found the right way of looking at the problem. Finding the proper balance is the key to any problem solution.

It is important to gather the right information before moving towards a solution. This information can complement what you have already learned and can help you make the decisions needed. It can come from the outside in the form of experts in a particular field, your suppliers and sometimes learning from what your competitors have done or are doing with a similar situation. And learning from other’s mistakes can be your best innovation.

It’s All About the Customer

Published December 28, 2009 Business Innovation , Collaboration & Communities , Crowd-Sourcing , Feedback , Idea Management , Open Innovation , Suggestion Box Leave a Comment
Tags: Crowd-Sourcing, Customer Care, Customer Suggestions, Customer-Centric Innovation, Feedback, Idea Submission, Marketing, Voice of the Customer

A driving force behind innovation is the customer. They are clearly in control of the buying and selling process. How can your business adapt to their needs and provide solutions for them?

If you simply listen to your existing and potential customers, you can get good insight as to if your product or service will be a success or a failure. You can also find out how much they want to pay, if they will give you repeat business and if they will recommend it to their friends. Their likes and dislikes can help us shape what we offer into what they really want.

If you take customer feedback seriously, we can adapt our business to fit their needs more closely. Their feedback can also help in the development of new goods or services or may offer new ideas on how to use or adapt your existing products.

Customer feedback can be acquired through face to face meetings, phone calls, emails or online surveys. A customer feedback form can also be included in your products’ packaging for them to fill out and mail to you. (It is recommended that postage should be prepaid so that they will be more likely to send it in.)

Employee Involvement

Published December 28, 2009 Business Innovation , Collaboration & Communities , Crowd-Sourcing , Feedback , Idea Management , Open Innovation , Suggestion Box Leave a Comment
Tags: Collaboration, Crowd Source Innovation, Employee Innovation, Employee Morale, Employees, Feedback, More with Less, Open Innovation, Teams, Teamwork

Due to the financial set backs our world has been facing, many businesses have had to do more with fewer employees. The remaining employees may feel like they have to do more work after others were laid off and see no reward in doing so. Morale can be at an all time low. This can negatively affect your company’s bottom line and it also can increase turnover rates. Innovation is at a stand still.

In order to turn this around, it is important to encourage your employees to work together in a team environment to get the job done thus spreading the work out over everyone, making it easier for them to do their jobs.

For example, if in the past only a few people were responsible for closing the shop each night, have everyone work together to close each night. With this method, by including everyone, the responsibility is shared and no one is stuck doing an undesirable task. No one is left out of the process. It helps your employees feel included and that they are just as important as every other employee.

By focusing on increasing involvement and encouraging their commitment to your business, the relationship between employer and employee will improve thus helping your business succeed.