What are the main trends in innovation? Mark Turrell, CEO of Imaginatik, shares his 10 predictions.

1. Innovation involves more than just R&D (seriously!) – Companies like Wrigley may have pioneered this, but it is clear that the best companies realized a while ago that R&D is only one aspect of innovation, not the be all and end all, and often not even the driving force. Growth often comes from innovation in new channels, new packaging, business models and so on – and it makes no sense to treat innovation as a single-function business activity, hidden away with the scientists in R&D.

2. Not enough invented here so look outside – We may still have cultural challenges to overcome in looking outside company walls to bring in new inventions and methods, but companies really don’t have a choice anymore. The pace of change is too rapid – and no firm can hire all the best people. Open Innovation is here to stay.

3. Experiment with Collective Intelligence and crowdsourcing – Expect to see an ever-increasing number of firms applying crowdsourcing internally and externally to address a variety of problems, from new product development to sustainability. The path has been set for expansion!

4. Ideas are precious so manage them – With Gartner predicting that Idea Management will be mainstream in two years, it is time for companies to effectively manage ideas and idea generation rather than relying on heaps of Post-Its and random spreadsheets. The methods and tools exist to do it properly, so companies in 2010 will really up their game in this area.

5. Innovate the Innovation Process (and do it properly for a change) – All companies innovate in some way. Some do it way better than others. Top firms have been experimenting for 10 years with online consumer insights, new means of doing rapid prototypes, and new physical environments to trial and test innovations in realistic scenarios. There are still too many firms jumping on to simplistic, fancy sounding innovation bandwagons, without thinking through the implications. So we’re expecting more companies to change the way they are innovating, and to spend more time putting in place proper systems to do so.

6. Innovation with full-time staff… – It is remarkable how many firms do NOT have full-time staff working on innovation. Firms have 50-person six sigma teams, and 25% of a person’s time to drive innovation. That does not make any sense – and has been proven not to work over the last five years. Companies therefore are moving people into innovation full-time; more and more are doing so to manage the process of innovating.

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Earlier this week I spoke with the people behind Guerra Creativa, an interesting Latin American crowdsourcing community for design services. I learned why it is a creative community more than a contest website, that logo contests are proven to be most successful, and that the community is growing fast with more than 3.400 creatives now.

What prompted the idea behind Guerra Creativa? What’s your vision?

The idea of creating a company like Guerra Creativa came to us when we realized that thousands of companies are getting started in business, needing to create their logos and websites, but not all of them can afford renowned design studios. We believe in crowdsourcing and that’s why we started Guerra Creativa. It gives everybody the opportunity to have access to a service that provides a large variety of quality designs at a good prize.

What has happened since starting up?

Guerra Creativa has attracted more then 3.400 creatives, who already uploaded more than 11.000 designs! We added a community to our platform and every day we’re working on the improvement of our website.

How do you differentiate from competitors like crowdSPRING, 99designs…?

Guerra Creativa offers a world wide community to all our users where they can interact and learn from each other. We are giving every user the power to show the world what they can do, to develop their skills and to have fun, make new friends, and some money. In Guerra Creativa everyone can say what they like, give an opinion or just show their work. We have launched a new section that allows all of our users to get exclusive tutorials, with step-to-step instructions of different techniques and some good advices from our Interactive Creative Director Alberto “Kaiser” Sosa.

We are not just a contest website, we are a Creative Community.

Which design contests are proven to be most successful?

We have seen lots of different contests in Guerra Creativa since it was launched. Till now the logo contests are the most successful, as they attract a huge number of entries and a great amount of proposals within a short period of time. Besides the logo contests, we also see special requests coming in for T-shirt designs and CD-covers.

What have you learned so far?

We had people starting contests from all over the world, like Argentina, United Kingdom, New Zealand, France, Austria, Brazil, Netherlands, Belgium, United States, China and Spain. The main reason for launching a contest on our website is the great amount of high quality designs for a reasonable price.

Our creatives mostly come from Latin America and for them what counts is the combination of learning, getting in touch with other creatives and finding interesting work opportunities. This drives them to Guerra Creativa everyday!

A tongue-in-cheek history of our favorite paradigm
This new series offers a not-so-serious history lesson about the difficult birth of open innovation and its little brother crowdsourcing. It is a long story to tell, so we have divided it into five little parts: From the golden age of closed innovation, cash-carrying guinea pigs, Mr. Chesbrough’s famous thoughts, users to the lead all the way to open innovation to the fullest.
As we hope that you enjoy the ride we also suggest that you look out of the window once in a while to find out how far along the road your company has come.

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My company is my castle

Castles of Closed Innovation

Everyone knows that all companies around the world follow the same old tradition: we build, you buy. All companies, you might ask?
Well, dear reader, follow us back in the mists of the dark 20th century, when it was safe to say that in fact almost all companies in manufacturing came up with their own nifty ideas, transformed them in to terrific products in their own R&D facilities, produced them in their own steaming factories and finally released their products into the wild rivers of the distribution channels. To keep brief: A company was a castle, and it shall be protected with mighty walls built of occult company secrets and frightening patents.

Xerox the Great and other tales
During the rule of the merciless not-invented-here syndrome, companies sought protection from mysterious foreign technologies that would regularly jam their precious printers, mess up their sleek assembly lines and cheat in the beloved KANBAN card trading game.
Just listen to the story Mr. Chesbrough likes to tell: It was back in the days of the golden age, when Xerox the Great was not content producing its own toner, its own copy-machines and its own light bulbs. No, something just didn’t feel right with this odd paper the kingdom had been buying from some silly strangers. Thus, it was decided that it was best to make, not buy, and henceforth only Xerox paper was to be used within the extensive realms of Xerox.

No one dared to question the superiority of proprietary standards or the fact that companies always knew best what their customers want. It was not until the raging battle of the format war was over, while Sony was busy licking its wounds that a few bards would sing of the grave importance of investigating customer needs before going to war with a new product.

As you might have already expected, these days were as golden as they were numbered: the information age began to besiege the corporate fortresses, and as the reinforced masonries fell one by one, the logic of the closed innovation became as outdated as the infamous mullet. Next up, follow the road to the infamous customer labs…