6
USER COLLABORATION THROUGH PRIVATE ONLINE COMMUNITIES

ThomasTroch

InSites Consulting

Tom De Ruyck

InSites Consulting

6.1 Introduction

There's a common understanding that involving (potential) users in the development of goods and services results in propositions that better fit the needs of users and have a higher chance of success when they hit the market. By allowing (potential) users to participate in innovation, the organization will become more “open” and thus move from inside-out thinking to outside-in thinking. To anticipate the changing needs and expectations of users, it's not enough to do this at one moment in time. Private online communities provide a working tool to collaborate with users and structurally integrate their voice in every phase, making innovation more agile. Embedding the voice of the user in the internal processes supports fast decision making—not only to validate insights, ideas, and concepts, but to co-develop them in iterative cycles.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide the product development professional with a hands-on guide to integrate user collaboration through private online communities in the innovation practice. The chapter starts with the rationale for collaborating with (potential) users; and provides a comparison of different methods and when to use them. The next section describes the main objectives of such collaboration, illustrated with case studies. The remaining sections provide a step-by-step manual to setting up your user community.

6.2 From Crowd-Everything to Co-Everything

Business success is contingent upon the adoption of innovations, and new products, processes, and ideas. In turn, this is dependent upon consumers' acceptance and perceptions of an innovation. One of the major challenges for designers is to build empathy with the (potential) users of their creations. These users increasingly start to develop their own solutions to unfulfilled needs.

Users are the experts of their own experience and are spontaneously “defining opportunities” based on problems they encounter with the products in their lives. These are often shared on social media, mentioning the concerned brand or product. Moving forward to “ideation” and “concepting,” everyday people have the power to disrupt entire industries. Think about Airbnb, an online service allowing individuals to rent unoccupied living space and providing an alternative to expensive and often impersonal hotel stays. To tap into the expertise of users in innovation, designers need to move beyond observation in setting up an iterative collaboration.

Traditionally, the consumer is treated as a passive player in the innovation process, mainly because consumers are often relegated to the role of “validator” through traditional methods of consumer inquiry (Roberts et al., 2005). Stimulated by social media, innovation is moving from a dominantly “to consumers” approach to a “through consumers” approach. Examples of crowd-everything—the active and spontaneous participation of the crowd in key innovation challenges (Figure 6.1)—range from adapting existing products to better solve the needs of an individual to the funding of products through platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. This willingness of users to collaborate provides a massive opportunity for companies, following the emerging view (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2000; Van Belleghem, 2012) that organizations should extend their search for competencies by coopting consumer competence as a competitive strategy.

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Figure 6.1: Crowd-Everything: The Active and Spontaneous Participation of the Crowd in Key Innovation Challenges

Copyright © InSites Consulting

Muji is a Japanese consumer goods firm that experimented with taking both user-generated and designer-generated products to prototyping and commercialization. In the first year after introduction, sales revenues from user-generated products—like the Floor Sofa—were three times higher than those of designer-generated products. These effects increased over time and the user-generated products were more likely to survive the three-year period the results were observed (Nishikawa et al., 2012). While customers and designers were generating ideas separately in the Muji case, it is recommended to set up a more interactive collaboration for more complex product or product-service ecosystems.

Not only the end result of such collaboration is creating value, the act of collaboration in itself is creating value for users. When people construct products themselves—like IKEA furniture—or apply “postlaunch improvements,” they tend to overvalue their creations, a phenomenon known as “the IKEA effect” (Mochon et al., 2012).

The empowered consumer provides huge opportunities for companies, but the other side of the coin is that it is also creating urgency; if organizations are not fast enough, consumers will do it themselves. In this context, it seems to be vital for companies to embrace the creativity of (potential) users and to be able to react quickly to what happens in the consumer world by moving from crowd-everything to co-everything.

6.3 Crowdsourcing, Co-creation, and Structural Collaboration

There are different ways of being open (Figure 6.2); the most popular ones are crowdsourcing and co-creation. The main characteristic of crowdsourcing is that it is an open call to the world to help solve a problem. And everyone may participate. Crowdsourcing can be done as a one-off initiative focused on a specific issue: a challenge that is put online by a company. The crowd is asked to, for example, send in their ideas for a new campaign or product with little or no interaction between users. Lay's “Create Your Taste” campaign is an example of crowdsourcing new product ideas. A company can also ask consumers to bring in ideas for improvements or new products/services in a more structural way: ongoing and about a wide range of topics. A great example is “My Starbucks Idea,” an open online platform launched in 2008 by Starbucks to continuously be able to grasp the ideas from the crowd around its product portfolio and shops. It allows people to post an idea, to vote on ideas from others, and even to make those ideas better through conversations with other participants.

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Figure 6.2: DNA of User Collaboration Methods

Copyright © InSites Consulting

Co-creation typically takes place having a smaller group of well-chosen people with a specific profile in a closed environment. In this case, the goal is to go in-depth on a certain matter and to gain a rich understanding of the issue by being connected with users in an intense way, but for a short period of time. The objective is to formulate answers to relevant business frictions, by working together as a group. Typically firms have involved consumers in co-creating value at the early stages of innovation using well-established marketing research techniques. For example, focus groups and lead users are commonly used to develop and narrow down the product concept. However, these techniques are expensive because they require a lot of face-to-face time. In addition, they provide limited consumer-firm interactions as they involve small numbers of users during a short period of time. New technologies related to the World Wide Web that enable consumer-firm and consumer-consumer interactions are drastically changing the value co-creation landscape (Sawhney et al., 2005).

To really tap into the power of consumers for complex innovation challenges, a structural approach is recommended. In comparison to crowdsourcing, structural collaboration is a more iterative way of building on each other's ideas and developing concepts. It's not an open call to everyone; only the users who are able to generate rich output are invited. In contrary to most co-creation initiatives, structural collaboration is not an ad hoc interaction moment; it is taking the voice of users from the very front end to the back end of innovation.

6.4 Private Online Communities

This chapter introduces a tool that facilitates co-creation with users and is especially suitable to set up a structural collaboration throughout the innovation process. Private online communities were developed as a research tool to take advantage of the characteristics of modern users, matching their social media behavior and emphasizing the dialogue between brands and (potential) users. It's like a private Facebook that you use just for innovation purposes. Managing these interactions online has a plethora of advantages, from being able to set it up fast and cost-efficiently to covering all geographic markets with Internet penetration.

A private online community can be defined as “a small group (up to 150) of highly engaged people joined together by a common passion, connected online for a longer period, who are systematically engaged by applying various social media techniques” (De Ruyck et al., 2010). By definition, communities are not representative, as they work best with participants who identify with the topic and/or the brand hosting the platform. Although merely qualitative, communities are typically a hybrid methodology, combining the best of both qualitative and quantitative tools to generate rich insights or ideas. By connecting for a longer time span with users, knowledge that is gained in a first stage can be applied immediately, which automatically gives the discussions more depth.

Communities are upon invitation-only and with an innovation focus. These private communities focus on a specific product category, brand, or user segment. They allow innovation teams to observe, facilitate, and join conversations between (potential) users. Participants enjoy this more participatory research approach and the interaction reintroduces the social context often missing from other tools that conceive the user as subordinate and approach them in a top-down isolated fashion.

In terms of taxonomy there are several labels and definitions for private online communities used in practice today, which may lead to some confusion and some may even debate whether all of the labels classify as real communities. The labels range from virtual customer environments (VCEs), market research online communities (MROCs), blogs, bulletin boards, community panels, access panels, and so forth. While “virtual customer environment” refers more to the technology than to the approach, “MROC” refers to an industry where they are already successfully in use; market research. Private online communities distinguish themselves by keeping a balance between the duration, the intensity, and the level of interaction or conversation (Table 6.1). They are also referred to as “consumer consulting board,” indicating the position it can have within a company. The name embodies the idea that companies need to see and treat their consumer community as a board of advisors. They rely on them almost every single day, for most business decisions taken across the different departments of the company, including but not limited to innovation.

Table 6.1 Overview of Online Consumer Listening and Interaction Methods

Blogs Bulletin Boards Private Online Communities Community Panels Access Panels
Description 1-on-1 asynchronous discussions and observations Asynchronous focus groups or short-term discussions with small samples Asynchronous discussions with medium-size samples and variable duration Internet access panels with interactive social media applications Internet access panels
Duration Short Short Short to long term Long term Long term
Intensity High High High to medium Low None
Conversation 1-to-1 Many-to-many Many-to-many Little No
Research techniques Qualitative only Qualitative only Qualitative only Quantitative, some qualitative Quantitative

De Wulf and De Ruyck, eds., 2013

A private online community involves users in a more structural way in comparison to focus groups—one of the most popular approaches to involve users in innovation. The private online community has many benefits:

These characteristics make private online communities an Open Innovation tool that is particularly effective in executing the three stages of the innovation process shown in Table 6.2 and further defined in the discussion that follows.

Table 6.2 Innovation Stages and Objectives

Innovation Stage Objective
Uncover new insights Exploratory interaction with users; observational tasks and discussions lead to an immersion in the life of the target group and the discovery of new insights
Generate and craft ideas and concepts Co-create new ideas within a predefined solution space and develop them into concepts
Prototype and prelaunch the proposition Users adopt a prototype in their lives and participate in task-driven activities to improve the product and brainstorm about the go-to-market strategy.

Uncover New Insights

The first innovation objective where communities can be applied to collaborate with users is the shaping of insights. Ethnographic thinking plays an important role in the front end of innovation; the exploratory way of observing what people need provides access to actual behavior, attitudes, and values. The essence of this approach is to develop robust insights that can shape innovation concepts. The term “insight” is often misused to describe observations or superficial findings. Figure 6.3 highlights the four characteristics of a consumer insight.

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Figure 6.3: Definition of a Consumer Insight

(Verhaeghe et al. 2013)

  • It's me: All insights should be relevant for the consumer; they need to feel understood. Ideally the insight is also endorsed by the consumer's environment; it should therefore be contagious.
  • Aha!: An insight should be fresh, providing a new way of looking at things. This includes both discovering something completely new and uncovering an existing reality in a new way. An insight should not be immediately apparent; it is latently present and often you only realize that it is true the moment you hear it. It brings to the surface what was there subconsciously.
  • Emotion: An insight should have an emotional valence. It can be a friction or problem that consumers want to solve, but it can also be a desire for something. Consumers should be excited about having a potential solution.
  • Business potential: A good insight can unlock brand potential, uncover innovation, and lead to more successful communication and consumer activation. Ultimately it leads to more sales; an insight can be the start of different marketing elements in the marketing mix.

R&D and design activities typically integrate more traditional ethnographic techniques like observations, field visits, and interviews to uncover insights (Sanders and Stappers, 2008), while contemporary users are seamlessly switching between offline and online interactions in their lives. By ignoring the online conversations, we're not only missing out on valuable insights, as emotions are often the trigger to share an experience on social media. We're also missing out on a natural tool to capture the online and offline behavior of individuals in an efficient way. By increasing the reach of ethnography, it can have a higher impact on business decisions. In addition, the variety of social tools—from diaries and discussions to mood boards and video challenges—increases the richness and eventually the depth of the data.

Private online communities facilitate a unique approach for insight activation, maximizing chances to detect strong and differentiating insights. Insights generated through research communities have proven to be 82 percent more effective in the market (Peters, 2012). Multimedia ethnography allows the community members to share their experience and habits through stories, pictures, and videos on a private and personal blog. The meaningful observations from this blogging stage can then be further shaped in the discussions. The blog stories and forum discussions are analyzed through info structuring and pattern detection while visual analysis principles (Pink, 2007) provide understanding of the visual output.

KEYS TO SUCCESS

  • Uncovering new insights is not only about engaging the community members to blog about their lives and specific situations like their meals. To get everything out of the data and not miss out on crucial details, the perspective of the (design) researcher is not enough. The researcher is looking at the data from a personal perspective, which is different from the perspective and context of the user. “Crowd interpretation” involves users in the analysis to get a more holistic view on the data. Participants take the observations of their peers in three steps, from a description and an interpretation to an insight. Crowd interpretation is a powerful mechanism: it helps shed new light on the data and delivers 20 to 40 percent complementary insights which are of a similar quality to the ones derived from researchers (Verhaeghe et al., 2011).

PITFALLS TO AVOID

  • Ethnographic projects are exploratory and diverging by nature; consumer insight activation processes through private online communities can easily lead to dozens of insights that can all serve as a springboard for innovation. However, in the current commercial environment dollars are not limitless, so a selection of insights with the highest level of potential is becoming more crucial. A quantitative validation of the insights through an online survey can help distinguish the insights with the greatest innovation potential. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to validate insights are listed in the subsection titled Step 1: Define Your Objectives in section 6.5 “How to get started with private online communities” later in the chapter.

Generate and Craft Ideas and Concepts

The previous objective of uncovering new insights enhances the empathy of the design team by immersing itself in the life of the user. A deliverable in this phase is the definition of the design space and the specification of actionable problems. This solution space is based on high-potential insights and rich user information collected in the multimedia ethnography; it serves as a springboard for ideation. Although there is typically no lack of ideas in innovation teams, generating them together with users increases their relevance. Having this holistic view on the user also creates an understanding about which ideas are the ones to chase. Users don't only like to be involved, they expect organizations to involve them in defining their future. Collaborating with them in the product or service development flow creates a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Not every user is fit to co-create. Private online communities only work with people who are highly engaged, as shown at the top of the vertical axis on Figure 6.4. Eric von Hippel already coined the notion of leading-edge users in the 1980s (Von Hippel, 1986). Lead users sense needs before the entire market does and they are interested in finding a solution for them. For innovation research, it is advisable to approach users who are among the first to try new products and are prepared to take a risk with them. But while we need a group of innovators, diffusion of innovations happens when an innovation is “communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system” (Rogers, 2003). Therefore it is recommended to add a second dimension to the user profile: social independence versus interpersonal influence—the horizontal axis of Figure 6.4. As such we propose two complementary types of (potential) users to ideate and develop concepts within a certain product category:

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Figure 6.4: Innovation Profile of Users

Copyright © InSites Consulting

  • Independent innovators: These users formulate their vision about an innovation independently. They base this vision solely on their own experience and opinions, without taking into account what might be popular. They like to try new things and generally have more extreme views than the average user.
  • Social influencers: This group discusses innovations while taking into account what their social environment thinks. Influencers are regarded as creative specialists, who are quick to see the advantages of new innovations. Consequently, their opinions about such innovations are frequently asked for, and followed.

The longitudinal connection with the user community is especially beneficial in the context of ideation. Although live brainstorms can generate a multitude of ideas, the creative process is not limited to this one moment in time; users can think of an idea in the evening, the next day, or during a completely different activity on the weekend. Most traditional techniques don't capture ideas that are shaped in the mind of users over time. Ideas that occur in this second stage have a higher chance for breakthrough (Kahn, ed., 2004).

The online environment is particularly stimulating for the generation of ideas; users receive challenges based on the defined problems and can build further on each other's ideas to make them more relevant. In a combination of synchronous (live) and asynchronous interaction waves, the moderator is probing to move the participants from known to unknown solutions. By setting up a live online discussion or chat, a multitude of ideas can be generated in a short time. But for the shaping of breakthrough ideas, an incubation period is needed. The asynchronous community platform allows users to share new ideas and comment on each other's thoughts anytime, anywhere. Challenges typically introduce the insight to set the scene, followed by the problem definition in the “How to . . . ” format.

KEYS TO SUCCESS

  • In contrast to the previous phase, which is centered on the observations of users, in the phase of idea generation it is crucial for the design team to actively interact with the community. It is recommended to observe their ideas in the first wave, after which the design team can request participants to elaborate on their ideas. The company can share their own ideas for participants to comment on in a third wave.
  • As part of the guidelines on software, the use of gamification elements will be discussed further in this chapter. Gamification elements have proven to increase participant engagement in communities (De Ruyck and Veris, 2011) and the playfulness they evoke is especially useful in the context of ideation. Think about adding a countdown to ideation challenges, giving the ideas a status depending on their quality and unlocking information based on the efforts by the community as a whole (e.g., share sketches by a designer after reaching a certain number of ideas).

PITFALLS TO AVOID

  • Co-creating ideas and concepts with users results in a multitude of shaped concepts. It's crucial to judge the quality of this output without prejudices. Ideas need support within the organization or team to take them forward, but the belief should come from the intrinsic qualities of the idea and not because of political or personal motives. Therefore, it is recommended to closely connect the team with the users during the co-creation, so the professionals can truly empathize. In addition, more objective testing can be set up; the strengths of the co-created concepts and products can be validated from idea screening to concept testing and in-home user testing.

Prototype and Prelaunch the Proposition

In the NPD process the cost of changes increases over time while the flexibility to make changes decreases. Therefore, it is recommended to collaborate with users in a private online community from the very front end as previously described; by starting from relevant insights and co-creating concepts and ideas with innovators and influencers. But there are still a lot of variables to get right between defining a proposition and launching a product or service to the market. Therefore, getting the prototype or solution out of the lab as soon as possible is important in order to understand and optimize the actual user experience. From pre-launching a service to exploring the journey of a product and continuously improving existing services, involving users allows you to assess and develop a delightful user experience.

A private online community can be set up in this phase, but ideally users were already involved in an earlier stage and in this case the collaboration can easily be reactivated as both the platform and the users are already available. By setting up different collaboration waves along the innovation process, a truly user-centric approach emerges. In comparison to setting up ad hoc interactions through traditional techniques, this is also when private online communities become most cost-efficient.

The objectives of a prototype or prelaunch wave differ depending on the type of product and the level of detail of the prototype, but there are typically four building blocks, described in detail below.

  • Understanding the customer journey
  • Prioritizing improvements
  • Support and service
  • Go to market and positioning

Users live with products over time; a two-hour interview in an artificial setting simply doesn't give a realistic view on their usage and context. To get a holistic view on their experience, the journey needs to be captured from first impressions to ongoing use. The longitudinal character of a private online community allows users to capture and share these experiences near the moment of truth. By gaining qualitative insight and mapping frictions and delighters on the journey, the design team gains insight in the mental model of the user and where in the journey there is a risk for dropout.

The customer journey (Figure 6.5) starts with the “discovery” phase: “What are the first impressions and expectations? What is the out-of-box experience like?” Next up is the internal conceptualization or “understanding”: “Is there a fit with the initial expectations? Do users understand the features and benefits?” An initial opinion is shaped in the “evaluation” phase: “Will the product make life easier or solve a problem? Will it reflect how users see themselves and how others see them?” The product is first used in the “trial” phase when the user determines the worth or usefulness: “Is the performance as expected? What is the learning curve?” The use is confirmed when there's a fit between the needs of the user and the solution offered: “adoption.” When the user decides to continue use and an emotional bond is formed the “repeat” phase is reached: “Will the solution continue to solve a problem? Is this now the preferred way to solve this need?”

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Figure 6.5: Example of a Customer Journey

Copyright © InSites Consulting

When collaborating with users the number of improvements and ideas that are already present in the company will increase and gain relevance. To know which improvements to chase and how to prioritize them, a thorough understanding of the user expectations is needed. By discussing the context and the experience with users while stimulating them to share their suggestions for new features, a qualitative satisfaction model can be created.

The customer satisfaction model adapted from Kano (1984) divides product attributes into three categories: basic attributes, performance attributes, and excitement attributes (Figure 6.6). The model connects user expectations to the investment required to develop them, thus merging objectives of the user and the organization. Basic expectations are threshold attributes; their presence will go unnoticed, but their absence will cause extreme frustration. An example of such an expectation would be the audio control on the remote of a TV. The investment in performance attributes is directly proportional to the user satisfaction it will generate; the more the better. Users are also willing to pay a premium for products with more performance attributes. Most features users come up with fall in this category. Having access to more TV channels is an example of a performance attribute. Excitement or addiction attributes are the differentiating characteristics of your product. As these are often unexpected and linked to latent needs, they require an intensive interaction with users. Being able to continue watching the movie you were watching on TV on your smartphone would be an example of such a delighter. In the evolution of a product, attributes can drop from excitement to performance and basic. A structural connection with users will keep organizations in the driving seat to delight customers and be ahead of the competition.

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Figure 6.6: Customer Satisfaction Model

Adapted from Kano et al., 1984

When customers gain access to a prototype or product in beta phase, their questions and information needs will be very similar to those of postlaunch users. These discussions in the private online community can guide the development of product support, both in terms of content and channels. More and more organizations are moving from call centers to online and social media support to increase cost-efficiency, while the level of service is often an excitement attribute in itself for users. Understanding this mechanism for specific product categories can turn a negative experience into a positive and conversational one.

A final building block is the go-to-market and positioning. By mapping the product in competitive space and understanding the brand perception, the positioning becomes clear from a customer perspective. The stories of users and the drivers and barriers that are detected provide additional insights for the go-to-market strategy and messaging. It is crucial to emphasize the open-ended and spontaneous nature of these discussions among users.

In addition to these four building blocks, the overall question is a relevance check of the product: “Is it solving a need? What is its reason to exist?” Most traditional techniques are focused on asking questions, while the room and time for users to start spontaneous discussions among each other on the community can teach us even more.

KEYS TO SUCCESS

  • To get a rich understanding of the prototype experience, it's crucial to target users with a variety of backgrounds to cover as many user scenarios as possible. When testing smart phone applications, for example, private online communities allow you to invite users with different brands of smart phones and different versions of the supported Operating System.

PITFALLS TO AVOID

  • Depending on the product category, it won't always be possible to uncover the complete customer journey with one target group. Although private online communities work best with people who are already involved with your product or brand, to understand the initial phase it can be necessary to collaborate with nonusers. Users are not always able to remember what their initial impression of the product was, therefore it is recommended to capture this “near the moment of truth” with nonusers. To guarantee a successful and constructive interaction, it's important to ensure they are not rejecters of the brand.

Impact

The impact of collaborating with users on one or more of the previously described objectives is threefold: on the level of the product, the brand, and the company.

Companies that work together with users come up with more consumer-relevant goods and services. In a project to generate and craft ideas for H.J. Heinz, the ideas generated by consumers in a private online community were compared with ideas generated by the company team in a concept screener (De Wulf and De Ruyck, eds., 2013). Ideas generated internally at H.J. Heinz were significantly more perceived as being “unique.” Ideas originating through the community, on the other hand, were evaluated as more “consumer relevant” and obtained a higher “buying intention” in the same test among a representative sample of the population. To get to the best of both worlds, professionals should co-create ideas with users.

In a different study (Van Dijk, 2011) two different pack designs for the same product were compared. A claim was added to one of the packs: “co-created with consumers.” The other pack did not carry any such claim. Again, it was found that the pack with the claim was perceived as more “consumer relevant” and had a higher “buying intention.” This shows that it is not only about collaborating in itself; it is also about communicating about the fact that you do it. This leads to a humanization of the brand. Companies that are open to the outside world actually do something users expect from organizations nowadays. They are perceived as more contemporary and genuine. And through the positive (brand) experience, community members will generate positive conversations about the brand and become brand advocates for life.

Last but not least, organizations that are structurally collaborating with users gain the ability to move rapidly. It makes teams work on a project together, striving toward a common goal. And it is the user who determines the agenda and prioritization of features on the roadmap. The end result is a more agile company.

6.5 How to Get Started with Private Online Communities

The previous sections described the main objectives and the impact of collaborating with users, discussing how private online communities can be applied to reach these objectives. The remaining sections provide a step-by-step manual (Table 6.3) on how to get started and set up your own private online community.

Table 6.3 Overview of the Step-by-Step Manual

Step 1: Define your objectives How to match the role of users within the innovation phase of your project?
Step 2: Select the right technology What are essential features of a platform and what type of tools do you need?
Step 3: Recruit the right participants What are channels and criteria to find users to collaborate with?
Step 4: Engage your participants How to combine intrinsic and extrinsic motivation techniques?
Step 5: Set up your interaction guide How to initiate the interaction with users? What is gamification?
Step 6: Manage the interaction What is the role and the importance of the moderator?
Step 7: Analyze the results What techniques are recommended for the analysis of the results?

Step 1: Define Your Objectives

As with any project it is crucial to clearly define the objectives from the start. Setting up collaboration with users is a step-by-step approach that needs to be customized to how the company and the teams are structured. There are three things to keep in mind: (1) Is it an ad hoc or continuous collaboration? For ad hoc projects focus is important; reach one objective within one project. In a structural collaboration, multiple objectives and projects can be combined in waves. A wave in a structural project or an ad hoc collaboration has a focus on one of the three objectives previously described; uncover new insights, generate and craft ideas and concepts, or prototype and prelaunch the proposition. (2) Although these phases are sequential, it is not necessary to start with the first one; the collaboration with users can start in any of these phases. (3) These objectives are flexible and complementary; idea generation can be combined with additional ethnographic activities to inject fresh inspiration. It can be necessary to take a step back to understand the complete picture.

In the first phase of uncovering new insights, the goal is to be divergent through individual observations. It aims at discovering and shaping insights about people (target users and their needs), processes (decision-making process), and products (triggers and barriers for buying and using a product/service). While this exploratory phase can be about a broader topic or category, the other phases take place in a more defined solution space and are targeted toward converging relevant bits of inspiration into ideas, concepts, and improvements.

Clear objectives include agreeing on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that need to be measured and standards that need to be reached. Without the latter, it is impossible to prove what the collaboration adds to the innovation process. It is definitely a challenge to measure the impact of such a qualitative approach, but that's no excuse not to measure or start with a user-centered approach in the first place. By capturing and listing the existing insights, assumptions, and ideas within a project before the start, these can easily be compared to the outcome of the user collaboration. What is confirmed, declined, and complemented to the knowledge and creativity within the organization?

For each objective, there are three types of KPIs: (a) the direct outcome of the collaboration approach, (b) the influence on the innovation process, and (c) the impact on the performance of the organization (change of image, increase in sales, etc.). The latter are connected to the strategy of the organization.

“UNCOVER NEW INSIGHTS” KPIS

  • Quantity of observations (a)
  • Quantity of confirmed, declined, and new insights (a)
  • “Clarity” of the insights: “Is it written in consumer language? Does the wording need improvement?” (b)
  • “Relevance” of the insights: “To what extent can users personally identify with this statement?” (b)
  • “Freshness” of the insights: “Aha, users did not think of this issue or idea this way before!” (b)
  • “Excitement” of the insights: “How excited would users be if a solution or message was developed to address the issue?” (b)
  • “Contagious conversations” power of the insights: “How often are people talking about the issue?” (b)

“GENERATE AND CRAFT IDEAS AND CONCEPTS” KPIS

  • Quantity of ideas and concepts (a)
  • Quantity of ideas initiated by the users versus the company (a)
  • “Trial relevance” of ideas and concepts: “Is this useful for people?” (b)
  • “Repeat relevance” of ideas and concepts: “How often would people use it?” (b)
  • “Uniqueness” of ideas and concepts: “Is it unique compared to what users know today?” (b)
  • “Credibility” of ideas and concepts: “Do users believe the product or service will deliver upon its promise?” (b)
  • “Emotional excitement” of ideas and concepts: “Will users actively look for it if it is available?” (b)
  • “Talkability” of ideas and concepts: “Would users talk about it with their peers?” (b)
  • “Feasibility” of ideas and concepts: “Is this timing/cost/production feasible?” (b)
  • “Brand fit” of ideas and concepts: “Does it fit the long-term brand strategy?” (b)

“PROTOTYPE AND PRELAUNCH THE PROPOSITION” KPIS

  • Quantity of basic attributes (a)
  • Quantity of performance attributes (a)
  • Quantity of excitement attributes (a)
  • Product-specific performance indicators (b)
  • Revenue: performance in the market versus targets (c)

KEYS TO SUCCESS

  • Engaging the complete team at the company side from the start is crucial for a successful user collaboration. Without their involvement and buy-in there is a low chance that the insights, ideas, concepts, and improvements resulting from the initiative will have impact in the innovation process. In combination with the longitudinal characteristics of the method, they can adjust the direction along the way and reap the benefits of the intensive connection with (potential) users.

PITFALLS TO AVOID

  • Although defining the objectives is a critical phase in the project, it is recommended not to keep the objectives too narrow. Objectives should be flexible and complementary. Leave room for answers to questions you didn't ask by stimulating participants to spontaneously start new discussions themselves. Every interaction with users entails the opportunity to engage with them structurally. Keep the option open to engage with the community at a later stage in the innovation process. This proactivity will have an impact on the recruitment of participants and the communication toward them (e.g., engaging them for more than one wave).

Step 2: Select the Right Technology

To facilitate online collaboration with users, a platform is needed. Private online communities are inspired by the social media behavior of contemporary users. There are both free social media services available as well as dedicated platforms under a license fee. Specialized collaboration agencies typically have their own custom platform to match the objectives with the right tools, optimize user engagement, and increase the efficiency. Essential features of such platforms are the possibility to give only a select group of people access (protected with password) and features that allow interaction with and between participants. Password protection might seem a contradiction to “open innovation,” but it is in fact a crucial element to create a community feeling and build a relationship of trust with the participants. It allows the company to invite users with the right profile and provides a sense of exclusivity to the participants; not everyone is invited to take part. In addition, it also allows the company to protect the intellectual property of the ideas.

THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN FREE SOCIAL MEDIA SERVICES LIKE WORDPRESS AND DEDICATED PLATFORMS TO INTERACT WITH USERS ARE FOURFOLD:

  1. Fusion: Free services are typically usable for one type of activity—like a forum discussion or chat—and don't allow the fusion approach of merging different types of activities to get a holistic view on the topic. To guarantee a user-friendly approach, it is not recommended to combine different platforms.
  2. Experience: With their single-activity focus, most interfaces of free social media solutions are very much optimized. They are, however, not optimized to engage participants to actively collaborate for a longer period of time. Creating a delightful experience can be triggered visually, by setting up a custom-designed platform, often integrating the visual language and logo of the brand. But also by integrating “gamification” elements and other engagement techniques, allowing participants to collect badges and reach different levels based on their activity.
  3. Moderation: Dedicated platforms offer tools to track the activity of the participants and probe for additional depth with moderation tools. Integrated communication channels allow the moderator to send newsletters and/or text messages to the participants with a call to action to take part in new activities.
  4. Analysis: Engaging a community of users who are interesting and interested typically results in a lot of rich user information. Dedicated collaboration platforms have integrated tools to digest this information, facilitating tasks like tagging contributions and interpreting the outcome.

To be able to collaborate with users throughout the innovation process, these are the tools that a platform should support:

  • Forum for discussions: A tool where people can interact in the form of posted messages. To allow members to express themselves, this should not be limited to text. The platform should also support integration of pictures, movies, and the integration of external services like YouTube. Interaction is asynchronous, differing from chat rooms in that interaction is not live and is typically a lot richer as participants can choose when and where to contribute, giving them time to think and rethink, leading to richer contributions. Every element of the project is discussed in a different “thread,” a single conversation. Ideally these threads are clustered in “rooms” (Figure 6.7) to guide the mindset and the attention of the participants. These group discussions are often at the core of a private online community, capturing the conversation value of users in innovation.
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    Figure 6.7: Screenshot of a Private Online Community Platform

  • Blog for observations: A blank canvas to allow participants to express and project themselves creatively and individually. Blogs typically remain open for longer periods and are used for activities that require multiple interactions and multimedia uploads. Blogs allow participants to conduct self-ethnography and share snapshots of their lives throughout time. This is not about group interactions, but about a private interaction between the moderator and the participant.
  • Ideation for challenges: While a discussion is structured vertically or chronologically, idea generation activities take on a cluster-like structure. Members are able to post ideas as a reaction to ideation challenges and have the possibility to build up on each other's ideas by adding comments. Typically there is also a voting function to get a quantitative feel about the appreciation of the ideas.
  • Survey and poll for numbers: Although private online communities are qualitative in nature, it is truly a fusion tool, also incorporating short surveys and polls. As a community is not representative, the quantitative results should not be used as a validation, they should be communicated to the community as a trigger for further discussion. For these objectives, the survey features can be limited to single answer, multiple answer, and open answer.
  • Chat for online focus groups: An online focus group based on instant messaging technology. Participants still have the freedom to join from home or any other location, but the live sessions start and end at a given time. This activity can be complementary to discussions, for example to capture spontaneous reactions to a sketch. It is often used to kick off a new collaboration wave with the user community, as a way of introducing them to the objectives, expectations, and the platform.
  • Voice over IP (VOIP) for in-depth interviews: Invite a select number of participants for an in-depth interview to get more context on a specific topic that was discussed on the private online community. (Potential) users with a remarkable story or experience can provide additional details. In combination with desktop sharing, this can also be applied to understand the experience of a website or other digital service.
  • Specialized features: Depending on the topic, more specialized features—allowing participants to compose a mood board or to sketch their ideas for example—can be a valuable addition to the previously described activities.
  • Profile: In order to interpret the user contributions, it is necessary to gain insight into their individual background and context. A private profile allows users to introduce themselves to the moderator and enter a bio with pictures. Making this profile public within the community has the additional benefit of increasing the community feeling. When users get to know and trust each other they will share more personal stories and feedback.

With the number of smart phones rapidly overtaking the number of computers, mobile is a natural enhancement to such a collaboration, and the next evolutionary platform. Mobile interaction though is not the mere translation of current dialogue on a smaller screen. The use of smart phones represents a perfect complement to the desktop platform, leading to more personal and contextual contributions. It allows participants to capture pictures and videos, to upload them and comment on the spot. It allows on-the-go interaction, which can be extremely useful in an environment where participants receive tasks, which could be out of home.

It's an illusion to think all participants will spontaneously find their way to the community on a daily basis; they need to be continuously triggered and engaged to check out “what's new” and join recent activities. A successful technology setup goes beyond the platform by integrating an intelligent communication system. This can go from an email system that supports targeting of specific groups of participants based on their activity to updates in their social media feed, for example, through updates in a private Facebook group.

KEYS TO SUCCESS

  • It's easy to get lost in the plethora of features and possibilities. In selecting the technology it's important to match the objectives and focus on the intuitiveness of the software, both for users and internal stakeholders.

PITFALLS TO AVOID

  • There are great collaboration platforms on the market, which can be customized to meet the needs of a specific organization without big investments. It is not recommended to build a proprietary platform from scratch when managing user collaboration is not the main activity of the organization. Keeping up with evolutions in technology can result in unforeseen costs, e.g., updating a mobile application to support a new release of a mobile operating system.

Step 3: Recruit the Right Participants

Although technology is facilitating the interaction, at the core a community is about people. Not just a random group of people, but people who are interesting and interested. “Interesting” because they have experience with the product or brand the community or wave is centered around and like to share this. “Interested” because they have a brand and/or topic identification and they are engaged to make a difference. Yes, these users are biased, but they reflect an illustrative user reality and generate in-depth discussions (De Ruyck et al., 2013).

Just like other methods, discussions in private online communities also have a “theoretical saturation” point—collecting more comments is deemed to lead to no additional new arguments and has thus no additional value. In an online discussion, this point is reached around 30 comments on a specific thread. To reach this goal, it is recommended to engage with a minimum of 50 participants (Schillewaert et al., 2011).

More traditional techniques recruit users from (online) panels; this is also a valid way to target users to take part in private online communities. But why recruit fans of a brand from (online) panels if they already come together themselves on fan pages of social networking sites like Facebook and other “natural” communities? It's also possible to recruit research participants from client databases. Recruitment often requires a custom approach and it requires more creativity to find the more creative profiles; for example, placing posters with a QR code in venues they tend to visit or even setting up a “call for collaboration” in the media.

All participants are carefully screened, through an online survey, telephone, or face-to-face interview. Especially Brand and/or topic identification is an especially crucial criterion as it is an important predictor of active participation within the community.

TYPICALLY THIS SURVEY INCLUDES THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS:

  • Willingness to collaborate for the given timeframe
  • Internet literacy (experience with social media and fora)
  • Willingness to share opinion online
  • Brand and/or topic identification, a Likert scale with statements about the brand and/or topic
  • Experience with the brand and/or topic
  • Socio-demographic characteristics to select a specific target group (e.g., youngsters) or to ensure a heterogeneous community
  • Experience with or ownership of specific technology (e.g., smart phone) if necessary

Specifically for the objective of generating and crafting ideas and concepts, an additional requirement is needed: the innovation profile of the participant. There are two approaches to target innovators and influencers; the first approach is self-proclaimed to a set of statements. Literature on co-creation provides guidelines on statements to include in order to identify the most competent users. Following are two alternative scales for the self-proclaimed approach:

GENERALIZED LEAD “USERNESS” (BÉJU-BÉCHEUR AND GOLLETY, 2007)

  • I had expectations on the use of products or services long before others.
  • I have had ideas on how to improve products or services that have since been taken up by others.
  • Companies offer ideas that I have had for a long time.
  • My ideas are innovative compared to current practices.

EMERGENT NATURE CONSUMER (HOFFMAN ET AL., 2010)

  • When I hear about a new product or service idea, it is easy to imagine how it might be developed into an actual product or service.
  • Even if I don't see an immediate use for a new product or service, I like to think about how I might use it in the future.
  • When I see a new product or service idea, it is easy to visualize how it might fit into the life of an average person in the future.
  • If someone gave me a new product or service idea with no clear application, I could “fill in the blanks” so someone else would know what do to with it.
  • Even if I don't see an immediate use for a new product or service, I like to imagine how people in general might use it in the future.
  • I like to experiment with new ideas on how to use products and services.
  • I like to find patterns in complexity.
  • I can picture how products and services of today could be improved to make them more appealing to the average person.

The second approach is “proven” by reaching out to users who have already shared ideas and suggestions (e.g., on social media), by including creativity questions and/or by asking users to formulate ideas in the intake process. This is also referred to as the “critical incident technique.” This approach can cross the bridge between crowdsourcing and co-creation, giving users a challenge during the intake process and inviting the ones with the best ideas to join the private online community. It's even possible to combine the self-proclaimed and the proven approach to target innovators and influencers.

KEYS TO SUCCESS

  • The fundamentals of the community approach work on a global scale. In the following sections, the required “localization” of the methodology is highlighted as part of the keys to success. As long as the Internet penetration for the country or the target group is high enough, there are no boundaries to the geographic markets companies can collaborate with through private online communities. It is, however, recommended to set up communities in the native language of the users to allow them to share their thoughts fluently and spontaneously. This also guarantees nuanced opinions in the discussions. Only when there is a guarantee that the target group is fluent in another language than their mother tongue it is possible to set up a private online community in a non-native language, often English with participants from multiple countries (De Ruyck et al., 2013). In this case, it is recommended to include a TOEFL language test in the selection process.

PITFALLS TO AVOID

  • The recruitment of users is just the start. To evolve from a group of people who don't know each other to a community, it is important to build trust and engagement. To get a head start, a chat session can be organized before the kick-off to brief the participants about the project, the expectations, and the timeline (De Ruyck et al., 2008). Other engagement techniques are discussed in the next section.
  • Although private online communities are mostly integrated in business-to-consumer organizations, it is also possible to set up such collaborations in a business-to-business context. As long as there is an intrinsic driver to have an impact on the future of the brand, category, or product, it is possible to engage more professional users with this tool. Providing a learning experience and proving the impact of the collaboration is a requirement for a successful collaboration with professionals.

Step 4: Engage Your Participants

The focus in private online communities is often too much on technology while the common ground real communities share is engagement. To keep all members engaged, the perfect mix of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators needs to be created. Intrinsic motivation implies that members contribute for no reward other than the interest and enjoyment that accompanies the activity. In contrast, extrinsic motivation implies that the reason for participating is something other than an interest in the community itself (Deci and Ryan, 1985). In addition to these intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, social norms play an important role in private online communities. Certain members participate based on more self-centered reasons such as vouchers, where they seek financial benefits for themselves. Other members might feel morally obliged to participate and help the brand; they receive satisfaction from the fulfillment of their community tasks (Deutskens, 2006). The following framework presented in Table 6.4 and the following discussion shows how the key dimensions group the main ingredients for the cocktail of engagement (De Wulf and De Ruyck, eds., 2013).

Table 6.4 The Cocktail of Engagement

For myself/me For others
Intrinsic 1 Interest, enjoyment, and curiosity 2 Impact
3 Sense of belonging
Extrinsic 5 Financial rewards 4 Need for status and recognition

(De Wulf and De Ruyck, eds., 2013)

INTRINSIC MOTIVATION

  1. Interest, enjoyment, and curiosity: Users want to talk about topics they are interested in. Moderators need to play upon this need by enabling members to share their passions with each other. An example: empower them to start sharing tips and tricks. By playing on their shared interests, members learn new things about their favorite topic. Furthermore, by mixing different questioning techniques such as brainstorms, polls, and battles, the moderator can trigger curiosity for what will happen next.
  2. Impact: Participants want to feel that they have an impact on the brand or the company. Representatives of the company need to speak to the community participants and tell them what they learned and which actions will be taken based upon the input of the community. Participants tend to be realistic in this: they know that companies cannot tell them everything, that some things cannot be implemented because there is no fit with the company's strategy, or that it simply takes time to change things. In the end, it is all about managing the expectations toward users from the beginning.
  3. Sense of belonging: The value for participants goes beyond sharing their feedback and ideas; they typically want to connect with like-minded people and learn more about them. All members have a shared goal they want to reach together. The moderator needs to emphasize this goal to create a group feeling and make participants feel proud to be part of this group.
  4. Extrinsic motivation: Need for status and recognition: Nonmonetary returns are part of the engagement cocktail, such as the status and recognition members receive from the community. Members like to feel appreciated for their efforts. They want to be recognized as an expert on the topics they are passionate about. The next step describes how gamification on an individual level—by granting badges—is a technique to anticipate this.
  5. Financial rewards: While extrinsic rewards with a monetary value are not the main reason for staying engaged on the community, this type of incentive still needs to be added to our cocktail. When members receive their first invitation to join the community, this monetary incentive (a voucher or topic-related gift) is considered to be very important. However, as soon as the community has kicked off, there is a shift in motivations. Members get hooked to the community; the weekly challenges and the feedback they receive from the company keeps them energized and motivated to continue. When members are only motivated by tangible rewards, it will put them in the reward mindset of a gold rush. They link their behavior to the anticipation of the reward. This does not trigger rich data and rapidly reduces activity.

KEYS TO SUCCESS

  • From the first invitation to join the community onward, it needs to be clear what's in it for the participants. In almost all countries, the main reason to participate is the possibility to have an influence on the future of a brand or a product. But some countries are more extrinsically motivated than others. This is especially the case in the United States and Eastern European countries, but for different reasons. Americans consider it to be normal that there is a payment in return for performance. In most Eastern European countries, on the other hand, an (monetary) incentive is perceived as a nice extra on top of their monthly income. In Asian countries like China, the intrinsic part is more important: they like to be connected with aspirational brands and share their wisdom (De Ruyck et al., 2013).

Step 5: Set Up Your Interaction Guide

Collaborating with users for longer periods of time ensures a flexible approach, but it is still recommended to build an interaction guide for each collaboration wave upfront, leaving room for changes along the way. Thinking about this upfront is beneficial for both the participants and the internal team for the following reasons:

  • Schedule topics in parallel with the internal flow and deadlines of the project
  • Manage the expectations of the team toward the scope of the collaboration wave
  • Reverse-engineer the outcome; if visual inspiration is crucial to engage the team, these types of tasks should be included
  • By structuring the topics in a logical order, the story can take participants on an engaging journey. The storyline of a private online community can be compared to the script of a good movie.
  • Plug in more personal topics at a later moment in time; move from “we” to “me” once trust is built.
  • Include a feedback loop: build back on previous learnings to take full advantage of consecutive learning effects.

This is also the phase to already anticipate the processing of the community output; composing a tagging framework and analysis plan. The next four steps translate the overall objectives of user collaboration into a detailed interaction guide:

  1. From objectives to themes: To create an intuitive experience for participants, it is recommended to structure the discussions in different “rooms” with each having a specific theme or focus (Figure 6.7). When it is the objective to prototype and prelaunch the proposition, previously described themes like “understanding the customer journey” and “prioritizing improvements” can be discussed in different areas in the community. Also foresee a social corner where participants can start new discussions themselves or interact off-topic.
  2. From themes to topics: “What are the information needs for each theme?” Start with the more exploratory topics before initiating conversations on specific elements and map these topics on a timeline. It is recommended to limit the number of topics to about six per week to keep it manageable for all stakeholders. When the wave is about generating and crafting ideas and concepts, the topics are typically different ideation challenges, each sharing an insight to trigger users to come up with their solutions.
  3. From topics to techniques: What you “do” to people is as important as what you “ask” them. Connect each topic to a technique: give participants tasks to perform and use projective techniques to go beyond the rational. Ensure there is enough variety and alternate more difficult topics (e.g., a shopper safari where they go to a store and take pictures of different touchpoints along the way) with lighter ones. The techniques you can use will also depend on the activities available on your platform—from blog and discussions to short surveys.
  4. Written topics: The final step is writing out the topics. First describe the goal of the activity. Write each topic in an engaging and entertaining way. What you give is what you get; consistently embedding rich data like pictures and videos in topics will result in rich data from the participants. Avoid yes/no questions and make sure the topic is easy to comprehend and is free from jargon.
  5. Analysis plan: Define how the topics are contributing to the overall objectives of the project. Develop a tagging framework to process the contributions of the participants in the analysis phase (Step 7).

Turn the interaction guide into an engaging experience by adding gamification elements: applying the principles and psychology behind games to motivate people and enhance their performance. This can be done on four different levels (De Ruyck and Veris, 2011):

  • Question level: Turning ordinary questions into small challenges ensures that participants spend more time on answering them. Instead of asking people, “What is your favorite meal?” ask them, “If you had one minute in the supermarket and an unlimited budget, what would you grab?” Instead of asking people, “What does cool mean for you?” ask them, “Can you photograph exactly five things that explain what cool means?”
  • Individual level: Reward members for great achievements in the community by granting them with badges that give them a certain status. The badges indicate that users were part of a specific project or that they significantly contributed to an important breakthrough. The badges appear on the profile page of the community members.
  • Group level: The beauty of working with a diverse group of people is that it leads to rich discussions. In order to stimulate interaction, which always leads to a better outcome, one can organize battles of arguments between groups with different opinions or ask groups of people with the same interest to play against another team.
  • Community level: A final option is to build milestones that the members should try to reach by a given date. If the target is reached, a special prize or gift is unlocked. A visualization of an idea, sketched by a designer is a great “gift” in the context of ideation challenges.

Gamifying your community on the four levels described above can lead to seven times more on-topic arguments (De Ruyck et al., 2011). This results not only in more answers, but richer answers. People think harder by spending more time while answering the questions and performing the tasks.

KEYS TO SUCCESS

  • Tweak the interaction guide to your target group; for youngsters it is recommended to keep topics shorter and integrate a wide variety of techniques and tools, while older participants prefer to have less but more intense topics with a structured list of questions or tasks.
  • Select the moderator to match the target group. A private online community about technological or digital products, for example, should be moderated by a technology-savvy moderator.
  • Take over the vocabulary of the target group to accelerate the bonding. It's possible to adapt wording along the way, but this can also be done upfront by “scraping” a selection of relevant consumer conversations on natural communities that are freely accessible on the web. Doing so enables you to gain first feelings with the topics from a user perspective and to get things right from the start (Kozinets, 2010).
  • A different culture means different attitudes and values, leading to a different way of reacting to certain questions, tasks, and exercises. Some cultures, for instance, love to share a lot of details about themselves and their lives. Others prefer to talk about the group, which is considered to be a safer option. The same holds for ideation exercises. It is not a given in every culture that people are very used to taking initiative. They feel better when they are only asked to give feedback about what already exists (De Ruyck et al., 2013).
  • Adding elements of gamification to the community brings more richness to the table, but the level of and the intensity by which private online communities can be gamified differs from country to country. In Germany, for example, it is wise to limit it to a minimal level as it is culturally less accepted.

PITFALLS TO AVOID

  • Don't be afraid to share pictures and stories yourself, to “lead by example.” As long as you influence participants to use the right format instead of influencing the content of their contributions, it will stimulate a richer outcome. When discussing their perception of different brands in the airline category, it can be useful to give an example from the soda category.
  • Give the members of the private online community the freedom and time to start new discussions themselves. Posting too many topics or topics with too many subquestions or tasks is counterproductive to the contributions of participants.

Step 6: Manage the Interaction

Setting up a private online community creates expectations, within the organization and within the community. Although different employees can introduce themselves and can be active in the community, it is recommended to have one dedicated moderator who posts the new topics and moderates the discussions. It can be beneficial to have an independent and objective party to moderate and analyze the activities—an external moderator (from an agency). Good moderators have outstanding writing skills, are creative, and apply “social media” in human interaction. He or she must follow the four values of “openness” (being authentic, honest about the goals of the collaboration, and honest about themselves), “dedication” (the online environment is a 24/7 accessible environment), “passion” (given the nature of communities, the moderator must be engaged with the topic), and “forward thinking” (to foresee actions that are needed to make sure that the community stays healthy in the future).

Each topic should be moderated at least twice, informally and formally. Informal moderation occurs shortly after the topic is posted and first replies are in. The goal is to show appreciation to participants, empower them if they are unsure about their contributions, and give open feedback to guide the format of their contribution into the expected direction. Formal moderation takes place once the moment of theoretical saturation has been reached, 30 lengthy comments into a discussion. When hypotheses are shaped during the intermediate analysis, they can be translated to consumer language to probe for additional arguments, details, or examples in the formal moderation.

KEYS TO SUCCESS

  • The Cultural Iceberg model of the American anthropologist Edward Hall suggests that language is only a small part of culture (Dupuis, 2007). In order to fully grasp the local context and situation, it is recommended to work with a moderator who not only speaks the language, but a native who also understands all the other cultural aspects of a country (common values, beliefs, traditions, attitudes, and perceptions), next to the local market situation and the business context.

Step 7: Analyze the Results

Private online communities are a fusion tool, combining different methods and activities. For each activity type there is an ideal approach for analysis. As surveys won't be sent to a representative sample, statistics are not in the scope of this section. For the analysis of participant pictures, it is recommended to follow visual analysis principles (Pink, 2007). Techniques to analyze textual contributions from blog and discussion activities can be derived from the Grounded Theory (Savin-Baden and Major, 2013) while creativity techniques like SCAMPER (Eberle, 1971) can help to go from a huge list of co-created ideas to a fine selection of concepts. The latter two analysis techniques are described below.

A successful collaboration leads to a lot of online conversations and plenty of data to process. The qualitative analysis of the output is a combination of top-down (starting from hypotheses, like in traditional social science research) and bottom-up principles (starting from the data, like the Grounded Theory method). The latter occurs in five steps, adding the phase of “patterns and relationships” to the Grounded Theory method.

  1. Structure the data: Code and tag meaningful observations or discussions. This is the most descriptive and easy phase of the analysis.
  2. Label the data: Bundle your thoughts and group collections of codes with similar content into categories.
  3. Check the data: Critical reflection to check if the list of codes and categories is complete.
  4. Establish patterns and relationships: “What is the logic behind the finding, the reason why? How are the categories related to each other?”
  5. Make models and conclusions: Leave the data and generalize the findings to a collection of explanations that make sense of the subject.

It is recommended to perform the first three steps during the moderation of the community to increase the efficiency of the approach and to feedback intermediate learnings to the participants for probing and confirmation.

Co-creating concepts and ideas is by nature a more iterative process where ideas are shaped along the way, merging contributions from both the internal team and the user community. Ideas can be analyzed in a similar way to discussions, thus creating additional understanding about their context and “reason why.” By analyzing the ideas, the outcome is more than the sum of the different ideas. It can provide context and insight for future ideation. Creativity techniques can be applied during the moderation to increase the quantity of the contributions in a first stage and to further develop ideas into concepts in a second stage. One technique to develop ideas is SCAMPER (Eberle, 1971), a mnemonic that stands for Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, and Reverse.

  • Substitute: “What materials or resources can you substitute or swap to improve the product? What other product or process could you use? What rules could you substitute? Can you use this product somewhere else, or as a substitute for something else? What will happen if you change your feelings or attitude toward this product?”
  • Combine: “What would happen if you combined this product with another, to create something new? What if you combined purposes or objectives? What could you combine to maximize the uses of this product? How could you combine talent and resources to create a new approach to this product?”
  • Adapt: “How could you adapt or readjust this product to serve another purpose or use? What else is the product like? Who or what could you emulate to adapt this product? What else is like your product? What other context could you put your product into? What other products or ideas could you use for inspiration?”
  • Modify: “How could you change the shape, look, or feel of your product? What could you add to modify this product? What could you emphasize or highlight to create more value? What element of this product could you strengthen to create something new?”
  • Put to another use: “Can you use this product somewhere else, perhaps in another industry? Who else could use this product? How would this product behave differently in another setting? Could you recycle the waste from this product to make something new?”
  • Eliminate: “How could you streamline or simplify this product? What features, parts, or rules could you eliminate? What could you understate or tone down? How could you make it smaller, faster, lighter, or more fun? What would happen if you took away part of this product? What would you have in its place?”
  • Reverse: “What would happen if you reversed this process or sequenced things differently? What if you try to do the exact opposite of what you're trying to do now? What components could you substitute to change the order of this product? What roles could you reverse or swap? How could you reorganize this product?”

To make sure something is done with the results and to build a user-centric thinking culture within companies, it's necessary to apply similar engagement techniques to internal stakeholders as to participants. There's a three-step approach to communicate the outcome to the business: engage, inspire, and activate (De Wulf and De Ruyck, eds., 2013):

  • Engage is about confronting the team with the world of the user and with their own (lack of) knowledge about the matter.
  • In the inspire phase the internal stakeholders are inspired with the insights gained in an interactive workshop.
  • The activate stage of a workshop is about working with the results and turning insights into actions through ideation, concept-writing exercises, and the like.

6.6 Conclusion

Private online communities provide a contemporary solution to Open Innovation challenges. The intense interaction with users allows teams to make better decisions faster. It is inspired by the social media usage of users, offering them a tool to share their stories and ideas with companies. The private characteristic creates an intimate environment where participants are confident to talk about themselves and allows organizations to protect their intellectual property. To give users a structural place in the innovation flow through this tool, it is recommended to experiment with the ideal setup. Creating the right eco-system of technology, participants, topics, techniques, and interaction with internal stakeholders is crucial for embedding the voice of users in the innovation practice.

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About the Contributors

  1. Thomas Troch is Senior Research Innovation Manager at InSites Consulting. With a background in product and service design and a passion for understanding people, Thomas connects global brands like Heineken, Unilever, Vodafone, and Philips with their consumers through new techniques like private online communities.
  2. Tom De Ruyck is Managing Partner and Head of Consumer Consulting Boards at InSites Consulting. He is a keynote speaker and co-author of “The Consumer Consulting Board.” Tom is also Co-founder and President of the research association BAQMaR, and he sits on the board of several other organizations: MOAbouts Committee, NGMR, and SAMRA.