BrainWaves is a quarterly e-periodical for people who are interested in how organizations cultivate individual and group creativity. Each issue of BrainWaves features information and perspectives about individual and group ideation; how businesses and not-for-profits actuate the best ideas; and reports on remarkable innovations that promise novel solutions to intractable problems. Brainwaves is produced and edited by BrainReactions, producer of “outside insight” — ideas for organizations conceived by outside professional brainstormers and from online brainstorms using BrainReactions.net. BrainReactions also provides innovation training to help companies and individuals generate more and better ideas. 

---

SUBSCRIBE TO BRAINWAVES

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

FORWARD TO A FRIEND

---

In This Issue

• Beyond a contest for the “best idea”: A case of crowdsourcing through a brainstorming competition
• What’s All the Fuss About Engagement?
• Knowledge Sharing Tool SnapAnswers.com insures against knowledge calamities
• Owl Analysis: A Metaphor for the first round of analyzing ideas for innovation
• Training Webinar for Innovation Through Ideation
• Frost & Sullivan conference on Growth, Innovation and Leadership

No Comments | BrainReactions News, Creativity & Brainstorming, Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Managing Ideas, Innovation Techniques, Open Innovation, Voice of the customer, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation, Innovation Training, BrainWaves Emagazine | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

Contributed by Darin Eich, Ph. D., Chief Operating Officer, BrainReactions LLC

Open innovation is valuable because it can harness the perspectives, needs, and ideas of a large amount of individuals, whether they be current consumers of a product or potential users of a website. In order to innovate based on the perspectives of many people, a shift from acquiring the best idea to acquiring idea themes derived from hundreds of ideas from many users or consumers is needed. BrainReactions.net has just launched their first significant open innovation crowdsourcing effort in the form of a brainstorming competition where awards are offered not for the single best idea but for the top brainstormers. In the first few days of the competition there are 500 ideas from 60 different brainstormers. This competition is open for just under two weeks and closes on July 3rd, 2008. This specific competition offers an emerging case of crowdsourcing for the brainstorming purpose of generating multiple new ideas on the launch of a web application, including both marketing and feature development.

This case offers an opportunity to learn about the process of crowdsourcing for brainstorming. This competition has already generated different outcomes than a traditional closed room in person brainstorming session offers or what a contest where “the best idea wins” offers. First, who is brainstorming? Notably there are more brainstormers than in your typical closed room session and they come with and a more global perspective. For this competition, brainstormers come from throughout the globe with heavy representation from the U.S. and the UK. Since most web applications have a global audience and seek the perspectives, needs, and ideas of a wide range of users, crowdsourcing through brainstorming offers unique advantages. Also, new web applications want an opportunity to generate buzz. The brainstorming competition allows this through the marketing of the idea contest while a closed room in-person brainstorm does not because it is more private in nature. The crowdsourcing offers residual benefits, not just the ideas gathered and the ability to validate the direction and decisions through the voice of the user but the marketing of the competition helps to build awareness and launch the web application.

Important consideration is given to what happens before and after the competition. Most of the time spent with preparing the competition actually involves framing the challenge, creating background information (in this instance a free web based video), and identifying questions for brainstormers to generate ideas on. This takes much thought amongst organizers and the client as well as multiple iterations to finalize the questions and background. Alerting the network of brainstormers to begin was the easiest part as BrainReactions has a large network of creative brainstormers who can be readily notified with an email. It also important to consider what the final product of the competition could look like. BrainReactions brainstorming has slightly different desired outcomes then other contests which seek to generate a best idea. Rather than a single best idea, the goal of the competition is to generate hundreds of ideas from many brainstormers so that ideas could be synthesized and analyzed. The themes that emerge amongst many ideas from multiple brainstormers are often times more valuable than a “best idea” and often marketing and product development directions move forward from these themes. After the competition a team of judges with different expertise bases will also spend time at the end to select the top brainstormers based on the quantity of good ideas they provide. Since a goal of brainstorming is to gather a large number of good ideas to synthesize and generate themes around, going beyond just selecting the best idea is needed. This is a current and emerging example of crowdsourcing meeting brainstorming on the web.

No Comments | Creativity & Brainstorming, Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Managing Ideas, Innovation Techniques, Gen-Y ideas, Open Innovation, Voice of the customer, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation, BrainWaves Emagazine | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

Contributed By Dan Neely, founder and CEO of Networked Insights

There has been a lot of recent talk about “Engagement”. Engagement is the new metric for social media, the measure of success for social media marketing. Although clearly defining engagement has been a challenge and people have disagreed on setting standards, it is certainly a concept worth exploring.

As soon as social media started to change the way people communicate and share interests, values or concerns, it became a gold mine of customer intelligence and insight. The key to unlocking this intelligence is to understand engagement.

What is engagement? Engagement is a combination of how people interact with each other and content (viewing, posting, inviting, rating, etc.) and what causes people to change or define their behavior (how influential people or content are).

Engagement not only shows where people are spending their time, and what topics they are discussing and with whom, but also shows the degree and depth of customer-to-customer interactions. If ad placement is based on engagement, advertisers know that the advertising is more relevant to the people that see it because it is based on the topics and people that they engage with.

For advertisers and marketers, knowing facts about their audience before spending money on social media is a huge benefit. For example, if Nike notices that a large number of users on MySpace are engaging around a particular shoe model and that very few people are doing so on Facebook, it would make a lot more sense to spend more heavily on MySpace and know exactly where to place and direct that spend. This tactic uses engagement to ensure results, not just to measure them.

Marketers all acknowledge the importance of engagement. While the subjective aspects of the metric have yet to be defined, the factual elements taken from customer engagement provide the real value. Using engagement as a way to guide and predict your ad buy or marketing spend is a clear and simple method that leverages the customer intelligence that can be gained from engagement metrics. This intelligence can also help accurately inform the content and message of the resulting marketing collateral to ensure it resonates with the target audience.

Engagement is here to stay. Just like any new metric, it will take some time to take-hold and become fully standardized, but it is undeniably a multifaceted and powerful metric that can provide value to marketers throughout the marketing process – especially before it even starts.

About the Author:

Daniel Neely
Dan is the founder and CEO of Networked Insights, the leader in customer intelligence across social media. His 10 plus years of entrepreneurial, management and operational experience with technology companies, has given him the expertise in customer intelligence and experience with the challenges companies face in gathering relevant, real-time insights about their customers.
Before starting Networked Insights, Dan co-founded Market Performance Partners, which guided companies in market ownership through customer intelligence. Prior to that, he was the director of strategy at Scient, one of the fastest growing services company in history. Before Scient, Dan was part of the team that launched eSurance, the leading online insurance company.

No Comments | Gen-Y ideas, Marketing to college students, Marketing to young women, Voice of the customer, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation, Managing Generation Y, BrainWaves Emagazine | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

Contributed By Anand Chhatpar, CEO of BrainReactions LLC

Most corporate managers, at least twice every year, will fall victim to knowledge calamities. Let me share some scenarios:

Has this ever happened to you? You are working on a project for the last 13 months and are 5 months away from your 18-month deadline, and suddenly, there’s a “corporate restructuring” event that completely dismantles your team. You find yourself leading a brand new team, one that will never achieve the performance or efficiency of the old team because 90% of your team’s knowledge has gone away with your ex-team members. This is a classic knowledge calamity. It can also happen to you a lot if you experience employee attrition or M&As.

I’m sure you have experienced this scenario if you work for a company with more than 100 employees. You realize 3 months after paying an expensive consultant that the answers you were looking for were already known to this one guy, Bob, who sits at the other end of the floor from you in a different team and never really talks to anyone from your team. That’s another knowledge calamity: “information silos”.

Here’s a new one: Your team is relying too much on advice they find on online forums to run your business. This advice is less than accurate, does not specifically apply to your business, or is simply outdated. However, your employees don’t bother asking around the company to look for the internal expert on the subject because it takes too long compared to searching for an answer on the almighty Google. I have not found a suitable name for this type of knowledge calamity. Perhaps we could call it “Our employees listen to Wikipedia more than our Senior-VP.”

Yet another knowledge calamity is the result of overused group emailing that starts with the benign intention of tapping into collective brainpower. However, 15 emails later… who does not hate mass-group-reply-all emails? Enough said.

If you can identify with any of the knowledge calamity scenarios above, let me assure you that not all hope is lost. We have licensed a brilliant solution from FPS Consulting’s Jaki Scarcello and transformed it into an easy-to-use software tool. Knowledge sharing tool Snap Answers insures your company against knowledge calamities, and is worth your time to review. There is also a tour to show you how it works. Plus, all readers of BrainWaves get a complimentary 30-day trial account for their company if they request a demo of Snap Answers and mention BrainWaves.

No Comments | BrainReactions News, Creativity & Brainstorming, Managing Ideas, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation, BrainWaves Emagazine | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

Contributed by Darin Eich, Ph. D., Chief Operating Officer, BrainReactions LLC

The increasing emphasis on the need to innovate is leading organizations and individuals to collect more ideas to start down the innovation pipeline. The increase of brainstorming sessions, idea submissions, and contests to fuel ideas for innovation are leaving individuals with significant lists of ideas. Many ask us where to start and what to do next with their idea lists. This calls for a story and a metaphor.

When I was in elementary school my class took a trip to small state park in Minnesota, Forestville. When one goes to Forestville it is natural to go into a forest, so that is what this group of 30 youngsters did. I remember the park ranger telling the kids that he would give a quarter to the first one that could find a grey ball in the forest. This was unusual to us, we had never heard of such a thing. But, we were up for the challenge and a quarter was a quarter and they had hard stick candy for only 10 cents at the old Forestville country store. As luck would have it I was the first to find this grey ball. I gave it to the ranger and he gave me the quarter. He then told us something amazing. He held up the grey ball in the woods and told us that it was once a mouse. I quickly looked at my hand and was grossed out. He then said that an owl will catch a mouse and eat the whole thing. The owl will digest all of the parts of the mouse that it needs and spit out what it doesn’t need in this grey ball of fur and bones called an owl pellet. Fascinating.

I traveled to San Diego in September for a conference for innovation professionals from a wide variety of corporations. One thing that was interesting to me was that these professionals and their organizations had large amounts of ideas, could get many ideas, but what was needed was a way to quickly screen these ideas. During my presentation I told the story of the owl and I suggest doing what the owl does to the mouse. Why not quickly take all of the ideas in, and then quickly only keep and devote energy to digesting those ideas that you need, are beneficial to you, and belong in you. These are the ideas that match your criteria and are for the reason why you gathered ideas in the first place. Everything else can be spat back out in a grey ball of fur and bones.

In my world of idea generating more is better. More ideas are better than less ideas. The nice thing about ideas is that they are short and can be quickly read and judged. I regularly review, analyze, and synthesize lists of over 700 ideas and make quick decisions on them. The first stage is an important one, your quick review and selection of ideas. Many ideas just get read over because they already exist, are way too far out, or are not aligned with what the organization is about. But there are a fair amount of ideas that get digested and developed from this long list. This is valuable. The key is to not get intimidated by so many ideas and to be process focused. Process focused means understanding that generating a lot of ideas is key to discovering something new or creating something innovative. So, consolidate all those ideas and start spitting out some grey balls. It is also quite good to have at least a couple of owls analyzing ideas. What you digest may be different than what someone else digests, and you may be spitting out something that is healthy.

When we work on our idea generation projects we have at least 2 formal owl analysts who digest everything and spit accordingly back into the idea list or bank them for future consideration. So, also important is to store all of the waste, those ideas that didn’t make the cut. You never know when they could come in handy later. So, begin the work of an owl with digesting your idea list!

No Comments | Creativity & Brainstorming, Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Managing Ideas, Innovation Techniques, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation, Innovation Training, BrainWaves Emagazine | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

As readers of BrainWaves, you are invited to attend our exclusive “Innovation through Ideation” online webinar on Thursday, July 24th, from the convenience of your own computer. Details and registration for the event are available on our training website at:

http://training.brainreactions.com

In business, you need to make decisions, find solutions, and think up new ideas every day. Do you leave idea generation up to chance or luck, or do you use systems and tools to help you generate ideas?

BrainReactions has worked with the most innovative companies in the world. We are familiar with their methods of innovation, but we have also developed our own toolset that increases brainstormer productivity by 200-300%!

Transform your company with great ideas!

Attend the Innovation through Ideation webinar online on Thursday, July 24th and you will have the tools to transform the way you work. Register now at http://training.brainreactions.com

No Comments | BrainReactions News, Creativity & Brainstorming, Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Managing Ideas, Innovation Techniques, Open Innovation, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation, Innovation Training, BrainWaves Emagazine | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

Frost & Sullivan organizes some of the best innovation conferences in the industry and BrainWaves plans to cover their upcoming conference in San Francisco on Growth, Innovation and Leadership from September 14-16, 2008. They are also organizing an Executive Symposium on the Global Green Revolution there following the conference on September 17, 2008.

Their Speaker Line-up is excellent, and the focus of the format is on creating interactivity between the participants, which makes it truly valuable for all attendees.

If you plan to be there (you should), let us know and we would love to meet up and share innovation stories!

No Comments | BrainReactions News, Corporate Innovation, BrainWaves Emagazine | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this