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. 

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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

By Darin Eich, Ph.D., COO of BrainReactions

I attended this conference as a media partner from BrainReactions and OpenInnovators.net and set out to identify some overarching themes about the current state of open innovation for large organizations. “Advance innovative ideas through partner collaboration and co-development” was the theme of this 2008 Marcus Evans conference. The workshop tracks were labeled “dismantling the ‘not invented here’ mentality” and “establishing a culture that values open innovation at every level’. Some themes that emerged from the conference presentations from innovators like P&G, IBM, Clorox, Pepsico, Kraft, and others include:

1. Open innovation is a very new concept and most companies are just adopting it and learning it. This means there are a lot of failures and process improvements right now and the success stories are just starting. Even P&G which is recognized as a top open innovator is still on the journey and learning.

2. P&G is a leader. Other companies that want to be better at open innovation appear to recruit P&G innovation professionals to work for them thus gaining that knowledge and experience to apply within their own organization. I heard multiple instances of this during the conference. P&G really has an excellent reputation for open innovation with their “connect and develop” philosophy and mandate from the top to get half of their ideas from the outside.

3. Collaboration is critical. Most organizations are shifting to become more collaborative as this is key for open innovation. This also requires a culture shift and new skills to learn for innovators.

4. Suppliers and partners are key. Since much of the open innovation relies on the work of partners and suppliers, finding and assessing them is important to innovation success. Suppliers and partners can not only provide the idea but they can also help to develop the idea, provide the technology or knowledge to make it work, package it, or virtually anything else needed to create and launch a new product.

5. Searching is a key open innovation practice. Many of the organizations that presented today have a focus on searching for technologies and intellectual property that they can acquire to bring their ideas to market faster. This is much more efficient than creating the technology internally. Many examples in particular were given of product packaging that was found in Japan and licensed for use in the United States.

6. Open innovation is transformational and not transactional. Though you are relying on partners and suppliers to help you develop the idea you still must do much work to connect the supplier’s insights in and strengthen the relationship for the future. Open innovation should not be a transaction but rather a transformational experience that helps everyone learn how to innovate better and in new ways.

7. Open innovation is a result of desperation or challenges. Many of the organizations adopted open innovation because they had to. Their business was declining or they had to react to urgent challenges. For many this impetus for change ended up being positive because they launched an innovative new product (like Clorox Wipes) or gained a more efficient development process.

This article is part of the April 2008 issue of BrainWaves E-magazine on Innovation and Ideation

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

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?

Take a look at this list of 10 Accidental Product Discoveries that are still in the market today. If you simply wait around for a number of years, perhaps one day, lady luck will shine on you and make you stumble upon the next greatest innovation for the world making you and your company rich and famous! Perhaps, one day! OR… you could use a proven SYSTEM of innovation. One that works consistently and has been refined and developed over the years.

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, May 29th and you will have the tools to transform the way you work.

This article is part of the April 2008 issue of BrainWaves E-magazine on Innovation and Ideation

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 Peter Erickson, Senior Vice President of Innovation, Technology & Quality, General Mills
(See complete bio below the article)

For an entrepreneur, the idea of taking your innovation and sharing it with someone else – let alone a large corporation – can be an intimidating, if not daunting, task. Which company would be the best partner? How do you ensure you’re protected from a legal perspective? How will you benefit? If your goals are to take your product or technology to the next level, speed its time to market and grow its distribution to have a national or even global reach, then you may find value in exploring a partnership with a larger company.

There are several variables to consider when venturing into this type of partnership. Based on General Mills’ experience in working on a wide range of projects with partners of all sizes, we have identified the following nine tips for entrepreneurs seeking to develop a successful partnership with a larger company.

Nine Tips for Entrepreneurs

1. Create a differentiated opportunity. Articulate the unique and proprietary aspects of your product. How is it different and how is it better than anything on the market? Is there an opportunity to be first to market with a breakthrough new product? Explaining the unique benefits of your innovation up front will give the company a reason to take a closer look at your proposal.

2. Test your innovation. Develop a pedigree for the product. You will be ahead of the game if you are able to get your innovation into the hands of its end user. This will allow you to speak to the in-market performance and the consumer or retailer reaction. Some of our partners, for example, came to us with insights from selling their products on the Internet, in small regional grocery chains or on college campuses. That learning can go a long way toward helping a company understand the unique consumer benefits of your product.

3. Be selective. Focus on your lead candidate and avoid courting multiple partners at once. A company wants to know you are committed and willing to work together to ensure that the opportunity will produce competitive advantages in the marketplace. And remember, most companies, including General Mills, want to create relationships for the long term. Take the time and do it right.

4. Find a contact to be your champion. Navigating the politics and processes of a large corporation can be challenging. Having a tour guide is very helpful. For example, at General Mills your key contact will be a member of the General Mills WIN (Worldwide Innovation Network) team, our company’s external innovation group. The G-WIN team is always available to answer potential partners’ questions about our organization, our processes and about partnerships in general.

5. Do your homework on the potential partner. Use available public information to educate yourself on your potential partner’s lines of business, key strategies, industry and competitors. You should also familiarize yourself with the economics of the industry so you are well-versed in the financials before getting into any conversations about important details such as licensing fees. For example, potential partners can obtain company background and information on our approach to external partnerships from a video located on our G-WIN Web site (www.generalmills.com/WIN).

6. Connect the dots. Make the connection between your proposed innovation and the company’s business model and brand. For which product platform or division do you envision it to be a good fit? How would this help the company’s bottom line?

7. Demonstrate you can deliver. Describe your team’s experience in the industry. Prove that your product is scalable to the volume demands of the partner’s business. Have any claims you make about the product validated (e.g., health claims), and be sure to speak to the company’s priorities. For General Mills, food quality and safety are important, and our company wants to know you share the same values. If you do not have the expertise in a certain area – manufacturing, safety, etc. – don’t be afraid to tap outside consultants to develop those capabilities within your operation.

8. Have a business model in mind. Communicate the type of opportunity you are looking for, but stay flexible. Oftentimes, it makes the most sense to start with a smaller opportunity and then grow that into a broader, deeper partnership.

9. Part on good terms. If either or both companies in the partnership decide to pass on an opportunity, walk away gracefully and leave the door open to future collaborations. Often it is just a matter of timing – the best opportunity for collaboration may not be the first proposal, so maintaining rapport is an important element of eventual success.

Open innovation is an emerging trend, so be on the lookout for opportunities to grow your business through this type of joint venture. Regardless of whether you are in the food industry or another trade, stay mindful of the above suggestions and you will be well-prepared to enter into a mutually beneficial partnership with another company.

If you think your innovation is a good fit for General Mills’ business, our G-WIN team would like to hear from you. Through G-WIN, we seek external partners with patented or patent-pending technologies or commercialized products that would be complementary to our brands and businesses. Prospective partners may submit patented or patent-pending innovations to the G-WIN team through a Web portal at www.generalmills.com/WIN, or may contact the team with other inquiries by calling 763-764-4946 (GWIN).

About the author

Peter Erickson

Peter Erickson is senior vice president of innovation, technology and quality for General Mills.
As the head of General Mills’ innovation and technology organization, Mr. Erickson is responsible for the invention and commercialization of new food products and technologies that can help in nourishing the lives of its consumers by providing increasingly higher levels of health, taste and convenience. Mr. Erickson’s responsibility for the General Mills quality organization is focused on delivering brands that its consumers can trust and value through its global leadership in consumer and product safety.

Mr. Erickson has been employed by General Mills for the past 19 years. Prior to that, he worked in product development as a senior food scientist at General Foods Corporation in White Plains, N.Y. Mr. Erickson received both B.S. and M.S. degrees in food science at the University of Massachusetts, where he continues to serve as a member of the university’s food science external advisory board.

Headquartered in Minneapolis, General Mills is a leading global manufacturer and marketer of consumer foods products with significant operations located around the world. Its global brand portfolio includes Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, Green Giant, Häagen-Dazs, Cheerios and more. In the United States, General Mills consumer brands are sold in every section of the retail grocery store, with a No. 1 or No. 2 leading share position in nearly every food category in which it competes. General Mills also is a leading supplier of baking and other food products to the foodservice and commercial baking industries.

No Comments | BrainReactions News, Creativity & Brainstorming, Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Managing Ideas, 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 Anand Chhatpar

I had the chance to interview Dominick Martinetti, CEO of Slappa Distribution, a small but rapidly growing company that is making a great name for itself among DJs and music junkies as an innovative product company. Dominick is an inspiring young man, and I have shared in this article, excerpts from our conversation that reveal his thinking and journey into market leadership.

Slappa has been in business for four years now, and it started with an initial product range consisting of CD cases. It was not a particularly “sexy” business to get into. CD cases had been around for 15 years, and the CD business was not growing aggressively any more. DVDs, computer software and video games still used CD cases, but the margins had been declining for most companies in this space. Also, brands before Slappa had commoditized the product — there was no real choice available to the consumers. Most of the people using these disc cases were forced to not have choices… outside of cosmetic colors, no one was building quality and variety into the cases. Therein lay a problem with CD cases from the consumer’s perspective, which Dominick was able to spot.

To conduct his market research and with an Open Innovation mindset, Dominick went to online bulletin boards and chat rooms for audio professionals like Audiophile, Audio Asylum and Audioreview.com. He sought advice on what these target consumers needed from the ultimate CD case.

He heard back two major things from them:
1. More Protection: A majority of CD cases available in the market were not providing any real level of protection for a person’s disc collection. People wanted to protect discs even while moving formats towards MP3. They wanted to protect their investment. An individual’s music collection alone can amount to anywhere between $3,000 and $10,000 over 15 years depending on whether one is a general consumer or a DJ.

2. People wanted to keep their discs and covers together: People did not like jewel cases because they cracked and then one could not keep their CD artwork (cover) together with the disc.

Dominick created a series of prototypes and sent them to influential journalists who write product reviews for well read magazines and blogs and asked for their feedback and advice on the design. He kept iterating and improving the design based on feedback from these reviewers. After 2 years of prototype iteration, Dominick finally heard “Its perfect!” from several reviewers and he knew he had a winning product in his hand. Dominick had designed the D2 patented pocket system which has a rear pocket for the disc and a front pocket for the cover along with a 5-7 mm opening. The shell for the D2 was made out of X-EVA, a fire resistant, water resistant material.

Launching the product now became much easier for Dominick. He put up a website at slappa.com and told all his friends and the product reviewers he was in contact with that his product was now available for purchase. The reviewers wrote rave reviews of his $49.95 CD-case next to reviews of top of the line $2,000 music systems. Slappa’s products achieved very quick acceptance among the “Pro Audio” market, and Dominick has expanded into distribution via retail, mail order, catalogs and other media where people can pay attention to details of the product.

Dominick’s inspiration is the Fossil Watch Company that made people think they were getting a better deal with a $79 designer watch from Fossil in a tin can than with a $20 watch from Walmart. He already has plans to expand his product line into backpacks, high end bags, and other products, while also expanding distribution globally.

When asked about why Slappa’s customers become huge fans of the company, Dominick says, “We’ve made ourselves a customer focused company. Each customer is our most important customer. You CAN please everyone, in a million ways. You just have to find a different way for every person.”

1 Comment | Innovation Techniques, Generation-Y wants, Gen-Y ideas, Marketing to college students, Marketing to young women, Open Innovation, Voice of the customer, New Concepts & Ideas, BrainWaves Emagazine | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

Facebook is an incredible social phenomenon that I am sure most of you have heard about. If you have not yet experienced Facebook, consider joining it at http://www.facebook.com

BrainReactions has recently launched an application within Facebook called the “Most Creative People“. It allows you to view and connect with the most creative people on Facebook and vote for your friends who are very creative. You can join the application and nominate any of your friends from Facebook to provide them further global recognition for their creativity.

The application is available at
http://apps.facebook.com/fbcreative/

Our network now consists of over 35,000 highly creative people from 142 countries. If you’d like to leverage our network for brainstorming with your target market, product testing with a particular demographic, online focus groups, product launch marketing, or any consumer-focused needs, please contact us here.

No Comments | BrainReactions News, Creativity & Brainstorming, Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Managing Ideas, Innovation Techniques, Generation-Y wants, Gen-Y ideas, Marketing to college students, Marketing to young women, 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 Anand Chhatpar

The Internet has become a powerful resource for any innovator, and there are a variety of online tools available to help you with various stages of the innovation process.

Let’s go down each step of the process and see examples of tools on the web that can be used along the way:

1. Opportunity Identification: For discovering opportunities to innovate and for finding areas of need and untapped demand, use the following websites:
ePinions.com: Reading consumers’ reviews and complaints about certain products tells you which problems could be valuable to solve.
Inventory.Overture.com: Searching for keyword terms and phrases on this website tells you how many people searched for that phrase and similar phrases last month on the Yahoo network. When you get the number of searches, you can triple it to get the approximate number of total searches worldwide. If you find an interesting phrase that has high searches but not too many websites serving the need, you’ve found a good niche to innovate within.
Trendwatching.com: This website tells you about trends happening in the business world today that you could align yourself with to take advantage of their popularity. Every trend highlights the opportunities for business that lie within.
SpringWise.com: Another great website from the people who run trendwatching.com, which features interesting new businesses starting up around the globe. If you see a successful business in another country that could apply to your country, it is a clear-cut opportunity and you have lower risk because the business model is proven in another market.
Emily Chang’s Ehub: Emily does a great job of cataloging the latest Web 2.0 applications in her Ehub database. Many of these applications have become instant hits with the online audience and one can detect amazing opportunities by looking at the adoption rates of applications like Twitter.
Ethnography using YouTube.com: Who said watching YouTube videos all day doesn’t have business value? If you watch enough videos of people on YouTube using everyday products like skateboards or brooms or any personal care products, you will start observing trends and opportunities. For example, why do people still fall on ice during the winter? Shouldn’t this several thousand year old problem be solved by now?
BrainReactions.net: Using our online tool at BrainReactions.net, you could do a survey with your target audience to ask them what new products or services you could create for them. You’d be amazed at the number of opportunities you can uncover by directly getting in touch with your target customers. People like to talk, give feedback and brainstorm. Just launch your question and invite them into the conversation to see the results!
PewResearch.org: This website has an incredible database of research polls conducted across dozens of categories on hundreds of topics. Their reports uncover trends that can be used to pinpoint new opportunities.

2. Brainstorming: Once you’ve found areas of need and opportunity, your next step would be to brainstorm solutions that you can create to meet the need:
BrainReactions.net Brainstorming Rooms: You can use private online brainstorming rooms to brainstorm ideas with your friends, coworkers and even your target customers. You can not only add your own ideas but also sort and rank them. Simply launch a new brainstorm within your brainstorming room, invite the participants and let everyone collaborate.
If you prefer making mind-maps instead of group brainstorming, there are alternatives to BrainReactions.net like Mindmeister.com, bubbl.us, and MindJet.

3. Research: Once you have brainstormed a list of ideas and sorted them into top concepts, you probably want to do some more research on the most promising concepts in order to finalize on the top concepts you will create prototypes for. The following tools will help you with further research:
Wordtracker.com: Entering a keyword or keyphrase into wordtracker gives you a list of similar terms people search for online, and also provides you with an analysis of which of those keywords has the least competition, so you can easily get the highest search engine ranking for that term.
Patentmonkey.com: A much nicer interface than USPTO’s own patent search, which allows you to not only check out the patents related to your idea, but also find out their status to know whether the patents are currently active, abandoned or expired. Google also has Google Patent Search, but it does not tell you the status of the patent yet.
SpyFu.com: Competitive intelligence for your keywords that tells you approximately how much money your competitors are spending on pay-per-click ads and what terms they are using for advertisement.

4. Prototyping: With your research, hopefully you have narrowed down your concepts into the top 3 to 5 that you will take to the prototype level and test with the market. The following websites will make your prototyping task easier:
eMachineShop.com: Website that provides you a free CAD tool to design your product and to upload your design to them so they can actually manufacture it and ship it to you. You can order just one piece or a thousand, and the pricing varies according to materials used. The beauty of this software is that it gives you instant quotes when you are designing the prototype, so you can adjust it to make it cheaper.
eLance Photoshop artists: The eLance freelance talent market has a number of photoshop artists who can make a life-like looking image of your product or service idea using photoshop and image manipulation. Making the poster for a product in this way is much cheaper than making the actual product and allows you to test the market quickly and cost effectively.

5. Validation: Now that you have your prototype, your next step would be to show it to your target customers and see if people would like to buy it. You would do this before spending large amounts of money on R&D to make the product.
Kancept.com: Brilliant website made by master inventor Osman Ozcanli that allows you to upload a product concept photo and see an approval rating from a broad target audience. This website is like hot-or-not for product concepts.
Vizu.com: If you need more sophisticated answers and more granular survey audience targeting, you can use Vizu.com that allows you to conduct a distributed survey on the web for a very low cost.You can upload your product concept image and ask any question to your survey audience, so this tool can also be used to determine target pricing and other factors.
eBay.com: Here’s a brilliant idea coming from Timothy Ferris, author of the Four Hour Work Week. Ebay.com, the popular auction site, can be used to test your concepts quickly. Tim uses Ebay to post pictures of the concepts and guages the interest from the market by looking at how many bids he receives and what prices people are willing to pay for this product. He cancels the auction just before it ends and pays a small fee to eBay for doing so, but gets a lot more valuable market research in the process.

6. Implementation: Arguably, the hardest part of any innovation process is to fund, staff and execute the implementation plan for the product concept. Here are some online tools that can help:
Prosper.com and Zopa.com: Online markets for loans that allow people to get personal loans at reasonable prices from a large number of individual lenders. You can post your product concept here along with your funding request and if you find many “investors” who believe in the product, you will get the funding for it, upto $25,000.
GoBigNetwork.com: This online community connects entrepreneurs with angel investors and other people who can help with implementation of a new business.
eLance.com: If you can break down the implementation plan into a series of detailed steps, chances are that you can outsource most of those steps to highly qualified yet cost effective freelancers you can find on eLance.com or similar talent websites.
LinkedIn.com: The largest online professional network, LinkedIn has experts in every given area you can imagine.
Amazon Web Services: Jeff Bezos & Company have done a great job of providing a group of web services that can be very useful to entrepreneurs and innovators. In additional to scalable storage and computing, Amazon.com also has a drop shipment service they call Amazon Fulfillment. So, if you have a product that sells online, you can ship the container to Amazon, they will store it, package it and ship it directly to your end customer for reasonable costs. You can even automate the process programmatically because Amazon has a powerful web services API.

No Comments | Creativity & Brainstorming, Managing Ideas, Innovation Techniques, 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 Julia Styles

Crowdsourcing has been the buzzword of the summer. With the continued growth of Web 2.0, crowdsourcing has become a viable method of obtaining information and skills from the masses.

What is crowdsourcing?
According to wikipedia, “Crowdsourcing is a neologism for 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.”

It is essentially outsourcing to customers and other average people, usually via the web or an organization.

Who uses crowdsourcing?
Famous users of crowdsourcing include YouTube, Threadless, Lego, iStockphoto, Digg, and Procter and Gamble.

As discussed in Connect + Develop, P&G employs more than 9000 scientists and researchers in corporate R&D and still has many problems they cannot solve, so they go to the crowds. P&G posts challenges on InnoCentive, offering large cash rewards to more than 90,000 “solvers” who make up this network of backyard scientists, according to Open Innovators. P&G also works with organizations that provide crowdsourcing or outside innovation, including NineSigma, YourEncore, Yet2, and BrainReactions.

BrainReactions and crowdsourcing
BrainReactions essentially is organized and controlled crowdsourcing. Companies invite us to participate in their front end of innovation, or idea generation phase. Not only do we provide them with the voice of the customer; we help them develop new products, packaging or marketing messages all under an agreement of confidentiality. This type of outside innovation works very well, because it comes from the customer, and it is less expensive than internal R&D.

Now BrainReactions offers crowdsourcing to anyone through our online social network for brainstorming — BrainReactions.net. Post your challenge in an open brainstorm room and invite friends and users to give ideas. Someone from the crowd might have the perfect idea for you.

Read more about crowdsourcing
The word crowdsourcing was first coined by Jeff Howe in a 2006 article in Wired magazine. Needless to say, Wired journalists have become experts on the topic. To read more on crowdsourcing check out all of these articles from Wired Magazine.

The Rise of Crowdsourcing.
Look who’s Crowdsourcing.
What does Crowdsourcing Really Mean?
Creative Crowdwriting: The Open Book.
Using Crowd Power for R&D.
News the Crowd Can Use.
The Experts at the Periphery.

To learn about specific strategies of crowdsourcing, check out Sami Viitamaki’s FLIRT model.

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