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.

7. … And full-time trained staff are best – Moreover, firms are starting to train their staff on consistent methods. The Hult IXL Center has made great strides in formalizing Innovation Management training. Right now there are many similar methods for handling innovation and all kinds of small training organizations who can help. We need to make a lot of progress in developing a common language and playbook. This will make it easier for firms to hire people into innovation positions, and to ensure a common level of competence and skill for those inside the firm.

8. Don’t be surprised that your CEO gets very interested in innovation – As firms climb out of the slump, growth is on every executive’s mind. Innovation has the track record of delivering real return on investment and growth in shareholder value. The CEO is going to be banging on the door of the innovation profession, and those inside the firm professing to be experts, to get some help putting their firms back on the growth path.

Please don’t disappoint!

9. The future is cheap … and coming from the bottom of the Economic Pyramid – Emerging economies have always had to innovate with less resources. Some have survived by being fast copiers of Western inventions. Others have progressed by dramatically cutting costs through cheap labor. However, we are now 15-plus years into the development of the emerging economies, and many of their successful firms are becoming prodigious innovators in their own right. Expect innovation methods developed in India and China to move into the Western world, bringing lower cost solutions to developed world problems. This won’t happen overnight – but the path is established so we’ll be looking out for signs (for example, bringing low-cost health treatments from India into Europe and the US).

10. Innovators learn to love measurement and ROI – The great thing about most types of innovation is that you can measure tangible net benefits to corporate activities. Companies really started taking innovation seriously when firms like Procter & Gamble calculated their Innovation Growth Gap. There are plenty of techniques to help companies measure both the potential impact of innovation, and the results of their innovation process. Now is the time to get the calculator out – it will help to justify budgets and expand one’s organizational capacity to innovate.

Mark Turrell is the CEO and co-founder of Imaginatik plc, a software and services company helping organizations solve their biggest and most important problems using Collective Intelligence, enterprise crowdsourcing and collaborative innovation. Prior to founding Imaginatik, he conducted his doctoral research at Cass Business School in London, studying the diffusion and application of collaborative technologies to business problems, whilst working at Intel. With Imaginatik, he and his team have pioneered many of the fundamental concepts behind innovation management, idea management and Collective Intelligence. Mark advises senior leaders on the practicalities of leveraging these techniques and has worked closely with Imaginatik’s Global 500 clients including Chevron, Pfizer, Whirlpool, and Xerox. He is a frequent speaker at conferences around the world, such as the World Economic Forum events at Davos and the World Innovation Forum in New York. He maintains links to the academic community and is an Associate Professor at the Hult International School of Management IXL Center. Mark is visionary in his thinking round the power of Collective Intelligence. He is passionately committed to making change on a global scale, and is driving Imaginatik’s initiative to work with nonprofits and NGOs to tackle world problems, such as water, energy, poverty and waste, spearheading the firm’s membership of the Clinton Global Initiative. Mark lives between Boston, Berlin and London. He speaks French and German, and enjoys travel and writing.

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!

—

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…

Now that both research and business have extensively experimented with and iteratively analyzed the execution of Open Innovation, a closer look on how to open-up the organization itself is needed. After all, organizations can’t act open on the outside if they’re not open from the inside. Like described in my previous post, the great pitfall of Open Innovation is to reduce the scope of Open Innovation to the output: exploit Open Innovation as a stand-alone project or (marketing) campaign. Once an organization acts open to involve the environment in its innovation process, the organization causes expectations at the environment to be really open through its veins in follow-ups too. Which means no ‘not-invented-here’ syndrome or deathly silence after the environment submitted their effort.

Manage input

This is why becoming an open organization is the first essential step to effective execution of Open Innovation. Becoming an open organization is the input needed to result in the required output: effective execution of the Open Innovation strategy; (intensive) cooperation between the organization and its environment including adaptation of contributions from outside the organization. Despite of all the Open Innovation research on the output side of Open Innovation, knowledge and effective approaches to support the input side of Open Innovation is lacking heavily. Strange, since we all know: without input, there is no output.

A systematical approach (model) on how to manage the implementation process of Open Innovation strategy is an important need to bring Open Innovation to the next stage. We need an input-focused approach that guides the organization through the implementation process, which is in fact an enormous change for most organizations. This must contain concrete plans of action on the different levels of the (internal) organization in order to create the right circumstances and commitment to implement Open Innovation in a transparent and predictable way.

Component 1: parallel sub processes

The implementation model covers the full impact that Open Innovation has on the (internal) organization. In order to divide the implementation process in logical sub processes which can be managed parallel to each other, we distinguish people, operations, policy, and culture:

• The people process focuses on the impact on involved stakeholders (e.g. learning, networking, incentive structures, etc.).
• The operations process focuses on how both processes and infrastructure are able to adapt Open Innovation the best (e.g. facilitation of regular knowledge & creativity sharing, web access, job descriptions, etc.).
• The policy process focuses on identifying bottlenecks in current policies and make adjustments to support Open Innovation effectively (e.g. information policy, IPR-policy, communication policy, social media strategy, etc.).
• The culture process focuses on communication and creating commitment at involved stakeholders (e.g. trust, openness, self-learning, etc.).

Using these ‘parallel’ processes makes it possible to focus (assign distinct responsibilities) and enable the sub processes to leverage each other by synchronizing their timelines.

Component 2: phasing change

At the same time the implementation model anticipates on the incremental structure of the change process and divides the sub processes in little manageable steps which are aligned with the incremental structure of change. As we know for decades the adaptation of change takes at least four phases and we will use this known fact to break down the four sub processes to manageable pieces (Hersey & Blanchard):

• unaware / incapable: the early phase where the organization has to be informed about the new directions: telling;
• aware / incapable: the phase where the organization will try out the new way of working in a save environment in order to gain trust and commitment: selling;
• aware / capable: the phase where the organization will use the new way of working actively: participating;
• unaware / capable: the ultimate phase where the organization will actually be the new way of working: delegating.

The logical split between these four incremental phases provides us with manageable subprojects within the four defined sub processes.

The result? We have broken down the complexity of the change process to 16 little manageable pieces. The great advantage is that every little piece can be provided with its own budget and own plan of action, which makes the implementation of Open Innovation transparent and predictable.

The little pieces of this model also break down the absolute chicken / egg situation between the required Open Culture and effective Open Innovation. Breaking the implementation process down it is easier to solve chicken / egg situations using incremental exchange between ‘chicken’ and ‘egg’, since this also breaks down the narrow sense of the chicken & egg relationship to adaptable (manageable) pieces. Divide the process in little steps to reduce the perceived difference and enable involved stakeholders to gain experience and trust in a safe environment. In this incremental way involved parties try and experiment by little steps and implement the Open Innovation strategy together with the aligned open culture bit by bit.

Direction and effective leadership

Using the four sub processes and the four phases of change in the implementation model implies a high level of flexibility. The earlier phases affect the latter ones, while the different sub processes affect each other. A predefined static implementation plan is not feasible and anticipation becomes essential during the implementation process. Like Robert E. Quinn would call it: “the organization has to build the bridge as it walks on it”. To maintain common goals during this complex implementation process, a clear vision from a strong leader becomes pivotal.

In order to keep all activities focused on one common end point during the complex implementation process, the end point must be defined clearly. The definition describes the new Organizational Identity (Albert & Whetten; Ashforth & Mael; Dutton & Dukerich; Empson), which facilitates all involved parties with continuous awareness of who they become and what organizational goals are involved to reach the end point. The Organizational Identity represents the glue and purpose during the longitudinal change processes and corresponds with the clear vision of the transformational leader that’s leading the organizational change towards an open organization.

So, if effective implementation of Open Innovation strategy requires a visionary leader that empowers the organizational members to work fully committed to one common goal, Transformational Leadership (Bass; Aviolo) is a precondition while managing change. The change process needs a leader who oversees the complex matrix structure of sub processes and phases of change. And who is able to adjust his / her leadership styles to the different phases of organizational change. The Transformational leader is a role model that expresses the values of the new Organizational Identity in every phase and is able to align the Organizational Identity with stakeholders, subprojects and budgets.

Open Innovation Chess Paradigm

When we put all above together in one picture, we have constructed the conceptual model of the change process we deal with while implementing Open Innovation Strategy:

This conceptual model contains all important elements of the implementation process. The conceptual model provides overview on the complex matrix structure of (internal) processes progressing along the different phases of change from relatively closed to a predefined state of open organization. It describes the persistent role of the Organizational Identity throughout the change process and the different leadership styles aligned with the subsequent phases of the change process.

The conceptual model is very useful for boardrooms, since it describes the abstract flows of the implementation process. It could be used as an easy speaker’s note while discussing the whole process, but is unfortunately yet not tangible enough to be used as steering wheel while implementing Open Innovation. It’s too abstract for a management tool that must be communicated (and identically understood) throughout all levels of the organization. To make it really suitable for effective management of Open Innovation implementation, it needs to be cut down to the ultimate level of simplicity.

Chess metaphor

To make this theory more tangible for communication, execution and monitoring purposes we will represent this conceptual model along a chess metaphor:

We suppose everybody is familiar with the basic rules of chess, so we have turned the conceptual model 90 degrees counterclockwise to convert it to a chess game. A game that’s remarkably comparable with Open Innovation implementation, since it’s a strategic game that contains different scenarios, anticipation, clear goals, and simple rules. Further chess includes different pieces (roles) and the game can be analyzed as a collection of little steps.

Let’s use the chess metaphor: Along the four (internal) processes of people, operation, policy, and culture we will play the chess game from a relatively ‘closed’ baseline through four phases of change (info, try, use, and be) towards the ‘open’ end situation. To cut it down to concrete manageable steps we have used the black and white squares of the chess board to represent the collection of concrete steps that have to be taken in order to complete the implementation process.

Finally, from a communication perspective, we have assigned roles (chess pieces) to all leading parts of the paradigm. In this way all involved parties will understand their role in relation to the ‘game’ and the other ‘chess pieces’. These pieces refer to the leading parts as follows: 

• The King represents the new Organizational Identity, the predefined end point of the change process which will be ‘protected’ by the rest of the chess pieces.
• The Queen represents a third party coach, which is able to guide the organization and the Transformational leader through the implementation process. The third party coach knows the rules of the game, overviews the paradigm, has an objective view on the organization and serves the King.
• The Rooks represent the management and will cover both columns and rows, which corresponds with the structure of the implementation process: per change phase.The management is able to interact with the King (‘castling’), in order to translate the new Organizational Identity to the respective level of execution.
• The Knights represent the Ambassadors. A selection of stakeholders that will be involved early in the implementation process to scout bottlenecks and solve (‘jump over’) hurdles before the rest of the stakeholders confront it.
• The Bishops represent the rest of the stakeholders excluding the employees: suppliers, customers, experts, environment, etc. The existing stakeholders have to ‘keep in the same color’, which means that they must be kept aligned with the changing situation. New stakeholders may arise when the open strategy implies that some internal processes will (partly) be outsourced to parties outside the organization (specialists, customers, crowd, etc.)
• The Pawns represent the employees, probably the most influent role since they can make or break organizational change. In terms of chess: “Pawn is the soul of chess”, the Pawn structure determines the strategy.

The Transformational leader plays the chess game and makes sure that all projects stick to their planning and budgets and serve one common goal: fulfilling the new Organizational Identity …of an open organization.

In this way the Open Innovation Chess Paradigm becomes a very useful tool that enables the management to focus on concrete manageable steps (squares) and deal with all consequences separately. Management can assign own budgets and plans of action to these little steps. This will make the implementation process transparent, predictable and measureable. It makes it possible to prepare the implementation process as a set of projects, each with its own scope and own targets. Besides, it’s far easier to gain commitment for little steps separately.

Organization implements by itself

With the Open Innovation Chess Paradigm the organization is able to implement its Open Innovation Strategy by itself! In a matter of fact, the organization must do it by itself in order to be able to maintain the end situation after the change process. The role of the third party Queen is (‘only’) to coach and guide the organization through the implementation process. Sharing experience, feeding the management with knowledge. keeping overview, and monitoring the progress.

Filling the gap between the available abstract theories on Open Innovation and the need for more concrete approaches on how Open Innovation could be effectively managed, the Open Innovation Chess Paradigm aims to initiate the next step in Open Innovation research. The Open Innovation Chess Paradigm provides more insight on the input of Open Innovation and how to manage the impact on the organization. This will help organizations maximizing the output of Open Innovation, because it structures the input needed for the output: effective Open Innovation!
This post is a follow up of “Implement Open Innovation Strategy: Start Focus on Input”. In the following posts I will elaborate on (1) Change Management, and the role of (2) Organizational Identity and (3) Leadership during the implementation of Open Innovation Strategy.

Rob Veldt (http://www.linkedin.com/in/robveldt) is researcher, consultant and public speaker on Open Innovation implementation. Serial entrepreneur and investor; owner and founder of www.ideavents.com, www.ThinkTankThursday.com and www.Cash4idea.com, among others. Follow Rob at Twitter: http://twitter.com/innpowerer or email him at rob.veldt@ideavents.com.

Since Henry Chesbrough introduced Open Innovation to the greater public in 2003, both science and business investigated extensively in the subject of Open Innovation. Great potentials have been identified, especially due to the ability to innovate more (effectively) while actively integrating marketing targets at the same time. Open Innovation has hyping potential because Open Innovation activities serve the organization in several ways: (1) it leads to new innovations, (2) it represents the company and its proposition to the outside world, (3) it empowers internal resources, and (4) it fulfills the increasing need of influence consumers have on the products and services their paying for.

Scientists and thought leaders studied the opportunities of Open Innovation in detail. By now we know exactly what kind of Open Innovation should be most effective in certain markets, we know which parties to involve while ‘doing’ Open Innovation, and how to stimulate them. We even developed toolkits (Von Hippel) and strategies (Chesbrough & Appleyard; Ulrich & Lichtentaler) on Open Innovation execution. Further, research identified barriers to adopt Open Innovation, like (e.g.) intellectual property, corporate influence, business model, and culture (e.g. Chesbrough & Appleyard; Munsch; Read & Robertson), and more specific the well-known ‘not-invented-here-syndrome’ has been subject of discussion (Van de Vrande et al; Katz & Allen).

Research even suggests ways to deal with those barriers, but the great lack in current research is a practical toolbox that enables organizations to implement their Open Innovation ambitions in a sustainable way, taking these barriers into account. It’s exactly the ‘opening-up the organization’-part that’s underestimated in current theories. Open Innovation research to date is focused on how to organize the execution of Open Innovation, without questioning requirements an organization has to meet to execute Open Innovation effectively by itself.

Without Input No Output

Research keeps focusing on Open Innovation successes and analyses success factors instead of failure factors, which seems to be a false start! As if success can be guaranteed in a dynamic environment…

We shouldn’t only be analyzing output of some (lucky? temporary?) successes, while the successes are coming from a few pioneering organizations and lots of other initiatives are failing (Ulrich & Lichtentaler). Rather focus on what environmental characteristics must be met in order to decrease the chance of failure. There’s a need to learn more on how to effectively manage Open Innovation (Haverbeke; Van de Vrande et al.; Chesbrough) and the organizational needs that are essential to make sustainable implementation of Open Innovation possible.

From this moment, research must start focus on input. Without the essential knowledge about the needed input it’s not relevant to know how to deal with the output. Which internal and external barriers are organizations really dealing with in their aim to make effective use of Open Innovation; and how to deal (concrete) with these barriers? Input is needed to achieve a predefined output. Without input, no output!

Impact of Open Innovation on the Organization

Executing Open Innovation purely based on output is like starting just another marketing campaign, only this time with an innovation twist. Unfortunately that’s exactly what’s happening at the moment: stand-alone Open Innovation projects, without mandate, without clear corporate vision and without a well defined (corporate) strategy. That seems to be the reason why there are so many Open Innovation failures: ‘campaigns’ hardly pay attention to the impact of Open Innovation on the organization. These campaigns are simply not intended to involve organizational impact and don’t have the budget and mandate to do it either.

Looking at the input side, Open Innovation has significant impact on the internal organization. Imagine what Open Innovation means to:

1. involved people (employees, clients, suppliers, other stakeholders) in terms of new ways of working, incentives, fading distinction between work and (social) networks;
2. operations ((e-)processes and (e-)infrastructure) in terms of (e.g.) web access, communities, facilitation of knowledge and creativity sharing;
3. policy (written and unwritten rules) regarding (e.g.) intellectual property, privacy, outside communication; and
4. culture (e.g. openness, learning, networking) to create the right (and safe) atmosphere.

And all of them with impact on both inside and outside the organization. As a result, effective use of Open Innovation has a huge impact on an organization’s business model, since all underlying elements of the business model have to deal with the impact of Open Innovation and so must be redefined in terms of Open Innovation.

Manage impact

The above means that effective implementation of Open Innovation ambitions implies an organizational change from a certain state of ‘closed’ to a predefined state of ‘open’. Implementation of Open Innovation results in a change process involving people, operations, policy and culture. As a result, implementing Open Innovation requires professional change management skills, extensive preparations and effective leadership in order to be sustainable. During the change process the organization must be guided effectively through all barriers regarding the transformation from ‘close’ to ‘open’. The organization and its environment have to be informed about the new goals, have to gain experience with the new ways of working in a safe environment, and have to participate freely to finally become open through their veins.

This requires a concrete plan of action and true leadership with a clear vision. Everybody must know where the organization is heading. Leadership styles that adjust to the developing situation, from transactional in the starting phase to transformational during the change process (Bass). The leader has to involve all parties, guide them at the start and empower them during the change process in order open-up themselves in the end.

To solve these complex structures at the input side of Open Innovation current theories unfortunately won’t help. Existing models and strategies are far too abstract and output focused. In my next expert blog at Openinnovators.net I will introduce a new paradigm which enables organizations to implement Open Innovation ambitions in a sustainable way. A concrete implementation strategy existing of a clear plan of action, concrete goals, roles and leadership during the change process, and extensively paying attention to the essential input needed to bring the organization to the desired output: effective use of Open Innovation.

Rob Veldt is researcher, consultant and public speaker on Open Innovation implementation. Serial entrepreneur and investor; owner and founder of www.ideavents.com, www.ThinkTankThursday.com and www.Cash4idea.com, among others. Follow Rob at Twitter: http://twitter.com/innpowerer or email him at rob.veldt@ideavents.com.

Are you one of those who have never quite managed to set foot into the virtual world of Second Life? Why? Because you thought your ‘first life’ is just about enough as it is and you’ve just never seen the point in spending your time and money to buy virtual clothing and real estate? Well, just a few days ago, I was one of you. Then this commentary is about to open your eyes on how virtual worlds are apt to change the way online collaboration is done and what the future of open innovation is going to look like.

Ever since I had access to the internet I was fascinated by the possibilities of a connected world, laying just a few mouse-clicks away. However, not only has the internet heavily evolved but also has my usage profile of the web changed overtime. From my first homepage to addictively playing online games, from spending a ’second life’ in social networks to business networking nowadays, I dedicated at least a googol of hours to the internet.

Second Life: Technology of the future or a dying hype?

A few trends though passed me untouched, some of which were UseNet celebrities, online casinos - and virtual worlds. When Linden Lab’s “Second Life” went online in the summer of 2003 I couldn’t have cared less. The technology was coarse; especially the graphics were ugly, the inherent social network way too unfocused and the idea of meeting people that substitute their insufficient real life for a virtual life was not exactly tempting. I just didn’t see the point.

IBM employees experienced the phenomenon of 'immersion'

Six years later, this summer in the German online business platform Xing, I stumbled upon a group in which the possibilities of virtual worlds in business environments are discussed. In one of these discussions, Matthias Eichhoff (Director of Marketing at Second Interest AG) pointed out that virtual worlds are more and more becoming a superior surrogate to video conferences for companies. As participants will eventually build up a commitment to the place and its virtual people, meetings in virtual worlds were apt to replace video conferencing and eventually a lot of business travel.
At first I was very skeptical: As long as the virtual characters just plainly stand next to each other with text bubbles popping up upon their heads and now and then performing a pre-scripted dance move, video conferencing will remain the only substitute for “traditional” business meetings. But after reading about IBM successfully holding its 2008 world conference in a virtual world, I was not so sure about that…
The case study states that people waking up in the morning after the virtual meetings felt like they had actually attended a real meeting in which they interacted with others and carried home practical information.

It seems that immersion really does do the trick, even though graphics are coarse and interaction limited. So by that point I was becoming increasingly interested in virtual worlds. In my mind a vision about the possibilities of online collaboration in virtual worlds started to develop. If only the man-machine-interface would be better. If only gestures and emotions could be seamlessly transferred to the virtual world. What makes face-to-face interaction irreplaceable are gestures and facial expressions. To me, this seemed to be the limiting factor. It is not until some kind of hyper-modern sensor, capable of registering complete body movements and facial expressions in real-time, is available to consumers that virtual worlds will become truly invaluable to companies.

Project Natal: Is this what the future of online collaboration looks like?

Yet, in rare occasions, the future has already begun. In June 2009, Microsoft drew major attention to its newest prodigy, Project Natal, on the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2009. The tagline runs something like this: “Leave your game controller at home when you go over to your friend’s house to play Xbox, ‘cause with Project Natal you won’t need it anymore.” That’s great for gamers around the world, really cool…

Update - Alexander Schroll of Open-Innovation.net also welcomes your qualified input to broaden our understanding of open innovation practice in companies. Participate here.

What can you expect

• presentations in many different forms (audio slidecasts, full twitter presentation, inspiring slideshows,….)
• many interviews with start-ups, R&D professionals and innovation thought leaders
• live brainstorming on facebook/twitter
• live streaming and reports from several locations
• innovation challenge between student teams from the US and Belgium
• the “My half time pep talk for 2009″ global blog action
• a business model award
• keep an eye on small give-aways
• unique access to an online database of inspiring new materials
• participate in several Q/A sessions
• and a lot more…

Tagging/sharing
For those who upload materials or want to share their thoughts on twitter. Please make use of the hash tag #24hoi and shorturl http://bit.ly/24hoi

Join the marathon
Follow all the initiatives and participate in the online discussions during the 24 hour marathon!

The initiative is led by CreativeCrowds, and supported by Digital Pioneers. By crowdsourcing problems directly from citizens, towns and villages get a better view on what is happening, reducing the reaction lead times. “Problems” are forwarded right away to the right government body, whereas an “idea” needs 10 supporters to get it sent through. On FixMyStreet about 45% of the problems are actually solved! (see reports) Public crowdsourcing initiatives are gaining ground rapidly, and I trust in later stages the platform might be linked to ‘good corporate citizen’/CSR programs as well. Do you have a similar service in your country or region? What’s your experience/opinion?