How social computing can accelerate product innovation
In today’s hyper-connected world, change has certainly become the new constant. To keep pace with rapidly-changing customer and market needs, product-driven enterprises need to be able to listen, adapt and grow at the speed of a networked world.
The good news is that this same connectivity, along with advancements in software and devices, has given product-driven enterprises the tools they need to accelerate innovation and competitiveness—transforming from traditional product development to connected product innovation. Connecting with your customers and products through the Internet of Things is a key capability that I talked about in my last blog post to help turn insights and ideas into innovative products. The other important capability for connected product innovation involves social computing and your employees.
Social innovation: connecting teams and people
Social computing technologies offer a powerful way to connect employees and partners, individuals and teams—regardless of location and time zone—to seamlessly share ideas and develop collaboratively. The value of enterprise social networking should not be overlooked: it takes a connected network of people to serve a network of customers in today’s digitally-connected and quickly changing world.
Social innovation can help product-driven enterprises understand evolving customer and market needs; share ideas, knowledge and content; find expertise and knowledge; augment decision-making with consensus; and communicate and collaborate without barriers. All of these capabilities enable you to more quickly and easily infuse new thinking and creativity into common processes, solve problems, increase productivity, uncover new opportunities, and respond faster to change. So how can product-driven enterprises get the most out of the innovative potential of their employees and partners?
Best practices for social innovation
One best practice for innovation is a structured approach to help employees contribute ideas and proposals for the business to evaluate. Some of the most productive and innovative work happens when you can harness the collective knowledge and skills of a group. At the enterprise level, we’ve found this requires process in addition to culture and strategy.
We’ve tested and developed a framework and solution—based on Microsoft’s internal, partner and customer experiences—to best enable innovation. We refer to the solution as the Innovation Hub. The Hub facilitates innovation by engaging a social community of members and focusing their efforts on specific business challenges, opportunities or discovery. It helps the guiding team identify high priority ideas and proposals, and convert them into projects.
Using technologies like SharePoint, Office 365 and Yammer, the Innovation Hub can be configured to an organization and provides a repeatable model for innovation.
The Innovation Hub: how it works
The Innovation Hub utilizes three main constructs for collecting and evaluating ideas: the Idea, the Challenge and a Hub, with a built-in relationship to each other to ensure goals and objectives are always aligned.
The Idea describes a novel concept or solution proposal with supporting content from the enterprise’s social network. The Challenge is an event that takes place containing many ideas in response to a specific topic and uses game mechanics to increase participation such as limited time, popularity, process and awards. The Hub serves as the host for Challenges, collecting them and their associated ideas, and evaluating them according to business parameters.
It’s a competition that motivates, and once it happens the right idea will fly! This image shows you some typical uses for the Innovation Hub.
To learn more about best practices for innovation, download our free whitepaper.
