It’s hard to be sure exactly what social media will look like 10 years from now, but it is safe to say that it will have an impact on the way the world works. Just this week, LinkedIn was used by the US President as a platform to help him prep for a town meeting in California. A site called Quirky is using crowd sourcing to find product ideas, strengthen them, and make decisions about funding their development.
Companies see this, hope to benefit, but make serious mistakes.
More and more companies are going after some type of IT enabled “idea management” System, hoping to make a successful play at leveraging the social media phenomenon for finding the ideas sitting hidden in the minds of their employees. We run into this all of the time as we work as facilitators, trainers and coaches. In one case, with a large global client, we’ve run into no less than five separate IT groups creating some type of idea management or support system for their part of the business. The concept is to increase the number of opportunities a company can pursue to support growth.
At the same time, a recently released Bain study shares that a survey of nearly 400 executives worldwide finds only 15 percent cite lack of opportunities as the biggest barrier to growth — lack of focus, organizational complexity, and a risk-averse culture are to blame.
We believe there is an intersection here that does offer opportunity. We think that companies should involve themselves with social media in a way that they can foster creative collaboration among their employees, help them focus, break down the barriers created by organizational complexity, and reduce the risk of the wrong idea moving forward at the wrong time.
So forget about Idea Management Systems. Start looking for Creative Collaboration systems. Social Media type solutions that let people publish challenges as much as share ideas. Systems that let a lot of minds — rather than the elite few — weigh in on what the smart bets are.
Quirky seems to be an interesting model to look at, and there is a strongly competitive group of companies offering full enterprise level IT solutions for creative collaboration. Most do nothing else and are totally focused on creating a market leading competitive offering. Our second unsolicited advice is to stop looking to build it yourself. Go to the market and buy it. Our guess is you’ll spend more on the up-front, but save a lot in avoided costs and false starts. We don’t have a strong opinion about the best vendor, but know who the half dozen strongest players are. So if you want the short list, let us know. If you’re one of those vendors reading this, please no unsolicited calls to tell us about your product. If you’re good, we’ll run into you, or already have. If you’re working your way up the food chain, you can hire us to facilitate your strategic planning.
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