At the end of the fuzzy front end of innovation, a product concept has been ideated or developed and all of the technical, market, and competitive unknowns have been sufficiently reduced or eliminated to move the project forward into the firm's formal development process. However, the innovation job is nowhere near complete at this point. The concept still must be converted into a physical prototype, specific features to include in the product must be selected, tradeoffs need to be made across different specifications, the resulting product possibilities need customer reactions, and manufacturing processes must be developed. Finally, the marketing and launch processes must be constructed. All of these tasks lead to significant opportunities to include potential customers, suppliers, and other experts in the firm's innovation processes to improve the commercialization outcome. Part 2 contains four chapters with Open Innovation methods that can be applied all along the development process.
In Chapter 3, Keeping Up with the Virtual Voice of the Customer—Social Media Applications in Product Innovation, Anna Dubiel, Tim Brexendorf, and Sebastian Glöckner reveal numerous ways in which firms can benefit from using inputs garnered through social media in their NPD processes. These range from very passive mechanisms that require little investment except time, to much more interactive and time-consuming techniques. The chapter provides examples throughout and ends with a number of explicit keys to success that firms need to be aware of in using these techniques.
Peter Koen explains in great detail how to use three different kinds of “virtual” crowdsourcing markets to increase the probability of innovating a successful product in Chapter 4, Prediction, Preference, and Idea Markets: How Corporations Can Use the Wisdom of Their Employees. These markets generally use “the crowd”—masses of (typically faceless) individuals who are not employees of the organization—in one of several different ways. However, the chapter also includes advice on how to use the firm's own employees. Prediction markets are used to forecast a specific future event, such as how much of a product a market will buy. This number may help the firm determine how much manufacturing capacity to install. Preference markets are used to help the firm determine, for example, which features should be included in a product—and as importantly, which should be excluded. Finally, idea markets allow firms to use the crowd to solve hard technical problems or develop new concepts.
Visual thinking techniques can be used to give firms access to tacit, or difficult to articulate, information that external experts, customers, or suppliers may have that could help the firm, as Karen Kreutz and Kim Benz explain in Chapter 5, Catalyzing Tacit Knowledge Exchange with Visual Thinking Techniques to Achieve Productive Open Innovation Collaborations. This chapter focuses on why and how to employ visual thinking techniques when your employees are partnering with experts outside of your firm or with other firms. Simply put, integrating the tacit knowledge outsiders carry can be daunting because of unfamiliarity with each other's thought worlds and lack of trust. To achieve smooth tacit knowledge transfer, the authors first provide an overview of visual thinking, including the two main types: graphic group processes and knowledge modeling. The authors then explain when to use the two different types of visual thinking techniques, and how tacit knowledge is obtained, organized, and presented with these processes.
Part 2 closes with a chapter by Thomas Troch and Tom De Ruyck that provides insights into incorporating customers into your innovation process by using private online communities. Chapter 6, User Collaboration Through Private Online Communities, is a deeper look at one of the social media tools introduced in Chapter 3. In addition to explaining why firms should open up their product innovation processes to potential and current customers via private online communities, they provide a process for doing so. The authors then describe when to use different methods and compare them. Finally, they provide examples and lay out a blueprint for setting up a private user community for your firm.