Our list of leading examples in the field of open innovation and crowdsourcing keeps on expanding. The latest new-comer in the list goes by the name of Innovation Exchange (IX). The relatively new open innovation intermediary takes a focus on business innovation and adds an important collaborative touch to traditional crowdsourcing. I had the opportunity to present a couple of questions to Ash Seha, the company’s VP Marketing and Investor Relations.

компютри втора употребаHow/when was IX founded, and how has it grown since then?

IX was founded 18 months ago out of a boutique innovation consulting company which the IX founding partners established in 1997 in order to stretch the thinking of senior-level executives at global companies. IX was initially based on a private and pre-qualified community of innovators whom our clients could tap into. With a belief that more diversity is always a good thing in open innovation, we’ve recently transitioned to a new “public community” model with our new site (www.innovationexchange.com). We count several tier-1 Fortune 100 companies as clients, and were recently honored by John Seely Brown’s (johnseelybrown.com) decision to join our advisory board.

Why should companies choose for IX? How do you differentiate from competitors like Fellowforce, NineSigma, Innocentive…?

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When do you get your best ideas? You probably answer “At night,” or “In the shower,” or “Stuck in traffic.” You get a flash of insight: Aha! William Duggan explains in his new book, Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement, how the mind forms great leaps and how strategic intuition offers a 4-step method for identifying and capturing new opportunities. I had the opportunity to ask him some questions on the implications of his research for new product ideation, brainstorming, and open innovation.

1) What is the key message or take-away for practitioners in your book?

Successful innovation comes from new combinations of previous elements — the elements themselves are not new — and the method to make that combination contradicts the current practices of most companies who try to stimulate creativity and innovation among their employees.

2) How should for example a new product ideation project be organized if you take strategic intuition into account?

IDEO is famous for A) zany practices like an airplane wing sticking out of the office wall, basketball hoops, rollerskating down the corridor — and none of that matters. They also do B) rapid prototyping and intense customer observation — which is neutral, because you can do that and still get the actual creative part wrong. What they do right is C) bring people who worked on many unrelated projects together to design something new, to consciously bring previous elements together in a new combination. So I would say “do what IDEO does,” but C, not A or B.

3) Eliminate all regular brainstorming sessions?

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Logoworks is one of the largest logo design firms in the world (acquired by HP in May 2007), and has served over 45,000 small businesses since the company was founded in 2001. I had the opportunity to interview Noelle Bates, the company’s Director of Customer Loyalty, about their “peersourcing” business model, the NIH syndrome, and competing crowdsourcing initiatives.

1. In which way is Logoworks active in the field of open innovation and crowdsourcing?

How Logoworks fulfills on design work is not done by crowdsourcing in the typical sense of the word. We actually call what Logoworks does “peersourcing” because the work isn’t done in the form of a purely open call and the work isn’t done by an undefined group. (Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call.)

To explain, when Morgan Lynch, the founder of Logoworks, began developing his business plan one of the things he wanted to do was bring multiple graphic designers to a single project but he wanted to make it affordable to the customer. He figured the way to do that was to develop a network of pre-screened freelance designers who picked up the design projects at their leisure. The design community is not an open community, it’s a controlled entity called “Arteis.” Arteis started with just a few designers and as the customer base grew we were able to grow the design community through referrals by designers already in Arteis; that is why we called it “peersourcing” - all of the designers in our community were and still are referred by their peers. These designers, once accepted into Arteis, are able to log in to the Arteis portal to see what projects are available and then sign up for the projects in which they are interested. They know exactly what is required for the project and exactly how much they will be paid for their work before they begin on the project.

2. The Not-Invented-Here (NIH) syndrome is seen as a common obstacle in open innovation processes. Could you give 3 practical tips to change a company’s internal mindset to a culture of Proudly-Found-Elsewhere (PFE)? How are you tackling this issue?

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