Wisdom of crowds
The theory behind open innovation is that the sphere of knowledge and experience within the organization is necessarily limited. Worse, it may be further limited by corporate practices and processes. As people become used to working in certain ways and thinking in certain ways at work, they find it increasingly difficult to break out of these moulds and adopt new ways of doing things.
By tapping into external sources, you expand your knowledge base, bring in new ways of thinking and new ways of doing things. It is widely known that diverse teams are more creative than teams in which all people come from similar backgrounds. Clearly, then, adding further diversity to internal teams can only improve the creativity – and hence the innovation potential of that team and hence the organization.
Some people have taken this notion one step further and claim that the more people involved in generating ideas, the greater the diversity and level of creativity. This, however, is unproven empirically. Moreover, bringing huge crowds into an innovation process will have two negative effects:
1. The efficiency of any idea collection system is reduced as more people submit more ideas, particularly if the system is a suggestion scheme (see below).
Thus managing ideas becomes burdensome. Voting on ideas, incidentally, is not an effective means for evaluating whether or not ideas meet your company's business criteria. Hence ideas need to be reviewed by an internal team before they can be implemented and this eats into resources if there are thousands of dissimilar ideas to work through.
2. Elements of mob behavior can sometimes be seen. This is shown by people backing certain popular participants of a suggestion scheme, complaining that ideas are not being processed and submitting large numbers of highly similar ideas because this is what the crowd is doing. All of these actions add little value or diversity, but create substantial demands on resources.
Neither of the above effects is conducive to creativity and eventual innovation. The rule to bear in mind is that diversity is beneficial to creativity, massive crowds are not.
The theory behind open innovation is that the sphere of knowledge and experience within the organization is necessarily limited. Worse, it may be further limited by corporate practices and processes. As people become used to working in certain ways and thinking in certain ways at work, they find it increasingly difficult to break out of these moulds and adopt new ways of doing things.
By tapping into external sources, you expand your knowledge base, bring in new ways of thinking and new ways of doing things. It is widely known that diverse teams are more creative than teams in which all people come from similar backgrounds. Clearly, then, adding further diversity to internal teams can only improve the creativity – and hence the innovation potential of that team and hence the organization.
Some people have taken this notion one step further and claim that the more people involved in generating ideas, the greater the diversity and level of creativity. This, however, is unproven empirically. Moreover, bringing huge crowds into an innovation process will have two negative effects:
1. The efficiency of any idea collection system is reduced as more people submit more ideas, particularly if the system is a suggestion scheme (see below).
Thus managing ideas becomes burdensome. Voting on ideas, incidentally, is not an effective means for evaluating whether or not ideas meet your company's business criteria. Hence ideas need to be reviewed by an internal team before they can be implemented and this eats into resources if there are thousands of dissimilar ideas to work through.
2. Elements of mob behavior can sometimes be seen. This is shown by people backing certain popular participants of a suggestion scheme, complaining that ideas are not being processed and submitting large numbers of highly similar ideas because this is what the crowd is doing. All of these actions add little value or diversity, but create substantial demands on resources.
Neither of the above effects is conducive to creativity and eventual innovation. The rule to bear in mind is that diversity is beneficial to creativity, massive crowds are not.