Interactive Innovation

In a previous post, I had written about the notion of having to measure innovation. Innovation is typically viewed as being a highly fluid, creative and dynamic process, yet when done within a corporate R&D department, there is a need to place some quantitative metrics so as to be able to forecast whether an innovation that materializes has a chance of commercial success.

Yet upon reading the June edition of PM Network, which is monthly magazine published by the PMI geared toward the field of project management, the main feature article was on the 5 most important business trends anyone in the field of PM, or any business for that matter, needs to be aware of. The one that caught my particular eye was the trend of "Interactive Innovation". The claim is that the traditional R&D centers of corporations will become passe, as the so-called "crowd-sourcing" (I would also place the trend of "smart-sourcing" here as well) and social networking platforms of the new Web 2.0 ideologies take root.

As the article elaborates:

Tapping into that customer collective delivers powerful information to companies about market perception of their products—and where the Next Big Thing might be. In a survey conducted in December 2007 by the Marketing Executives Networking Group, 62 percent of the respondents reported using crowdsourcing to help them shape the future of their products. And while the majority of those surveyed rated crowdsourcing and consumer collaboration as an effective or highly effective approach to new product and service development, only 11 percent rated internal research and development staff this way.

Not so long ago, crowdsourcing was considered on the fringe, but these days it’s officially mainstream. U.S. computer manufacturing giant Dell, for example, uses its IdeaStorm website to identify new concepts and gauge consumer response to them.

Though I do tire of some of the hype and hyperbolie of the way in which Web 2.0 will change everything again (remember the dot-com hype and crash of the late 90s?), this is a real trend that will impact how companies do product and market research and it is going straight from a command and control structure of the industrial and maufacturing era to completely decentralized, collaborative and fractured information and concept driven era that we are now immersed in.

Thus what we have now is the need to balance the need to measure, predict and manage innovation, yet allow for the collaborative, dynamic and fractured nature in which it is now in part and will probably entirely be done in the future. It will be like one big, open sourced, multi-player interactive game of innovation that will be played between customers and companies for the benefit of all.