Figure 11.1 The Crowdstorming Lifecycle—Meta
We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are.
—The Talmud
Even the most complex crowdstorming cases we have discussed began as simple ideas. Giffgaff saw the opportunity to give more power to customers.1 Then they focused on how they would enable customers to run core parts of the business. LEGO wasn’t sure whether a handful of fans might be interested in helping to resurrect Mindstorms. The Quirky team experienced the power of lots of rapid feedback. They handed out 3,000 notepads at a 2009 conference and asked people to design iPod accessories. When the resulting product was a hit, Quirky was born to scale the process.2 In fact, no matter the domain or size of the business, all of our cases began with a simple question—“What if?”
While the search pattern goes back more than 100 years, the more complex crowdstorm patterns have only been a few years in the making. We’ve done our best to capture what is working today, but as you are reading this, we know that people are making improvements. They are asking “what if?” and revisiting everything from incentives to community management policies, from new coalitions to new metrics for monitoring. Testing, then, may be the most important part of the process, once you get started.
Fortunately, the same people who help to solve problems from business strategy to packaging design are just as willing to help you sort through the best ways to organize the crowdstorm process. Your crowdstorm participants are very likely the best source of great insights about what might work across all aspects of the crowdstorm process—from collective choice to sanctions. As political economist Elinor Ostrom pointed out in our discussion in Chapter 7, people have been figuring out how to build their own institutions to manage shared resources for a long time.
As we have tried to emphasize, we have not cracked the code on all the ways to successfully organize crowdstorming projects. In fact, we have a few hypotheses of our own that we think are worth testing. For example, it’s apparent that sustainability is an increasingly important issue for many organizations. Why don’t more organizations use crowdstorming to work with stakeholders to solve problems that can benefit all of us—at a minimum, trying to solve these types of issues can positively impact the brand and, if solutions are found, the business will benefit too. And it is it usually easy to get started because it is one area where confidentiality and intellectual property seem far less of a concern.
And, rather than focus on cash prizes, why not share more of the risks and rewards by offering more downstream incentives—from investment to revenue shares—in order to increase participation? It is possible to not just track sales, but we can also track things that lead to sales. Brands today focus very intensively on having people engage with their products and services, so why not expand the opportunity by also having people interact with possible products and services in order to give you more feedback about things you might do?
These are just a few obvious examples, each of which will lead an organization to either uncover a different approach to crowdstorming—or tweak an existing approach. The Crowdstorming Lifecycle ends and begins with “Meta.” (See Figure 11.1.) We know we can easily go through each chapter in the book and ask, “What if?” We hope you will too.
Figure 11.1 The Crowdstorming Lifecycle—Meta
There are a few ways to learn from your process and your participants in order to prepare for ongoing opportunities. Following are a few approaches that appear to be yielding success.
P&G has put over 1,000 partnerships in place. Jovoto has run over 200 contests. Quirky has developed over 200 products. LEGO has more than a decade of experience with different crowdstorming processes. Each of these experiences provides a baseline set of metrics—some of which are very simple. Local Motors’ Alex Fiechter pointed out that he has multiple ways to track overall community health, but one of his most useful is related to feedback—more time spent on the site by participants is a good indicator that feedback is improving. Why? It is very difficult to understand complex engineering problems without spending some time to understand what has been presented. It is even harder to provide useful feedback without taking more time.
Time. It is the biggest challenge to understanding the relationship between your changes and the resulting impacts on a process. When Sequoia makes a seed investment, they often have to wait at least five years to understand the results of their initial evaluation of a seed stage business. Local Motors needs 18 months to bring a new car to market. This is very fast by automotive standards, but it is a long time for a team to wait to see how their process changes affect outcomes. This is one of the benefits of working with partners for Local Motors. They not only have more interesting projects for the community to work on, but they can see more outcomes more quickly in order to understand what is working. In fact, not all outcomes need to have such long development times. Giffgaff is constantly implementing small service improvements—and has implemented one out of every eight ideas (from 7,000 proposals) since its 2009 founding3—so they are more quickly able to understand the relationship between their crowdstorm process changes and the business impact.
Metrics and end results are useful places to begin looking for new opportunities. But conversations have a way of yielding great opportunities, too.
All of the crowdstorming patterns provide at least one forum for discussion and debate—the support area. As support questions arise, it is a safe bet that people who get the opportunity to respond will also propose new solutions. Visit any of the support forums from the crowdstorm spaces discussed in this book and you will find proposals for some of the most complex issues we have discussed—from critiques of briefings and evaluation criteria, to better ways to manage voting and ratings. Other debates relate to more subtle issues—for example, how to improve the tone of feedback and whether or not particular sanctions are suitable for given type of negative behavior.
Jovoto’s approach to ratings has been debated for some time, as many community members want to express more subtle feedback in their scoring. For example, they would like to highlight the fact that something might be a very strong idea but that it is poorly presented. As you might imagine, well-presented ideas can crowd out less impressive peers when it comes to garnering attention. In the case of jovoto, debates about ratings have ebbed and flowed in the support area. In summer 2012, members of the community were invited to an in-person meeting with the team to finalize updates to the approach.
The most important thing that these platforms can do is to provide the opportunity for discussion, to chronicle the issues, inspiration and ideas. There may not always be a clear path to action. However, in the same way as comments can result in debates and add value to ideas in the collaboration and integration patterns, they can be valuable in improving the overall crowdstorm process.
At some point insights or debates move to tangible solutions. And it is often useful at this point to share your plans with the community. You don’t have to put everything to a vote; however, as we emphasized in our community management discussions, collective choice is one of the pillars of any successful community. Beyond getting buy-ins and respecting community members, there is also the opportunity to understand issues or concerns—or even learn something new. It is possible to skip feedback, but the probability of needing to apologize becomes very high. Assume that your community is going to behave like your co-workers except for the fact that most of them will not be able to react in person—their online expressions are likely to be much less forgiving.
Propose ideas? Discuss and evaluate them? Makes you wonder why organizations don’t just use the crowdstorming process to improve themselves. In fact, this is exactly what OpenIDEO did—“they ate their own dog food” by using OpenIDEO to improve OpenIDEO.
OpenIDEO is known around the globe for their design work, and they have literally written the book on the design process. In 2010, then-CEO Tim Brown had this to say about the role of crowds in design: “the idea of crowdsourcing innovation is, in my view, still a big experiment. Conventionally, the question has been whether the crowd can outperform the internal team. Our view is that small teams are good for some things and the broader community is good for others. The goal of OpenIDEO is to find out whether it is possible to orchestrate a collaboration between the two to achieve better results.”4
After the community’s first year came to a close at the end of 2011, OpenIDEO members were asked to share their ideas and feedback about how they might improve the forum—more specifically, how might they use OpenIDEO to increase social impact.5 The resulting discussion is very revealing. It addresses many of this book’s themes, including a strong desire for people to see concepts get beyond the online discussions and make real-world impact. One proposal called for an additional measure to give points to the people who actually make these ideas happen. In contrast, another person suggested that some of the contributions—like reading and voting—should be done on the go. The OpenIDEO platform would need to accommodate this type of access, most likely with a smartphone app or adjusted layout for the small screen. Again, we know from our discussion on contributions that a simple rule applies here: making it easier makes it more likely to happen.
Perhaps we can see the most visible change in the way the OpenIDEO process works. Prior to the end of 2011, if you were working on OpenIDEO you would be aware of its discrete set of processes. OpenIDEO organized their crowdstorms in steps,6 beginning with the inspiration phase. The objective was to share relevant ideas and research related to the brief. People commented and voted on the most inspiring content to instigate the next stage—something called concepting. It was during this stage that people submitted their ideas and weighed in on those that others submitted. It was not presented in a contest format, so collaboration was encouraged. Finally, ideas were judged in the evaluation stage.
This probably sounds familiar. But, based on OpenIDEO’s testing and refining and asking for feedback, they realized it wasn’t optimal. The design process now includes the new and important additional phase of realization. In this step, participants discuss how they have taken the ideas forward. Unlike LEGO or P&G or most of the organizations we have discussed, OpenIDEO is not involved in idea production. This is simply not their mandate. However, because their community emphasized this element’s importance, they are finding creative ways to take ideas further and they have adjusted their process to incorporate this.
The addition of the realization step underscores a final, important point.
The Halfbakery.com is one of the oldest places to share ideas online. The most important thing is to share and discuss ideas—not realize these ideas for society or for profit. The site exists solely to play with the concepts that people present. The results are often amusing because of their sheer daftness or deft copywriting (almost every year someone artfully proposes the wheel, heavily cloaked in masterful copywriting). In fact, you are likely surrendering some of your valuable time simply by visiting the site. You have been warned.
Though the Halfbakery.com is amusing, it is also an important reminder—one that helps us address this question: Why are we investing the time and effort in crowdstorming? We want to realize ideas. We want to make our way from a crazy notion to the Local Motors Rally Fighter. We want to make sure the LEGO Cuusoo Minecraft set is on the shelves. We want the better Giffgaff pricing plan (with or without tethering) and we want to use P&G’s Swiffer Duster. We want the science fiction Tricorder to transform healthcare alongside robot cars that drive us around, and we want much more resilient and sustainable energy system. Crowdstorming has played a critical role in all of these things bringing together the people and resources to bring the ideas to life.
Crowdstorming is just a first step in a much longer process. Long after many participants have forgotten about their idea or their comments, a team continues to figure out how to make ideas come to life. And it is important to celebrate when ideas make it all the way from possibility to reality—because it underscores that your organization can deliver on promises. It reminds people what can happen when they participate. It is not just ideas for the platform or the process or the community, but also the ideas that come out of the process. Where Halfbakery.com is a reminder that ideas are unfinished things to be played with, OpenIDEO’s realization step reminds us that this is the ultimate goal toward which we are working. As are the pages that document well-known companies on Sequoia’s website—they were once just ideas submitted via e-mail.
We’ve done our best to describe and share our observations about how you can put crowdstorming to work right now. The most powerful part of the process is that the people who are participating in the process can also help to make it better. It is fitting that a process built on the idea that the best ideas can come from anywhere also improves itself from ideas that come from anywhere. The most important part of your crowdstorming process is that you can turn it on itself to make it better.
Want more crowdstorming? Join us at www.thecrowdstorm.com to learn what readers are doing. Or better yet, share some of your own ideas and feedback.
Notes
1. “Reinventing Mobile: An Interview with Giffgaff’s Gav Thompon,” Contagious (March 22, 2010), www.contagiousmagazine.com/2010/03/reinventing_mobile.php.
2. Cliff Kuang, “Product-Design Startup Quirky Gets $6 Million in VC Funding,” FastCompany (April 7, 2010), www.fastcompany.com/1609737/product-design-startup-quirky-gets-6-million-vc-funding.
3. For details see Giffgaff Idea Board, community.giffgaff.com/t5/Contribute-Innovation-Promotion/The-Ideas-Board-How-to-submit-and-FAQs/ta-p/4062075; and community.giffgaff.com/t5/Blog/Ideas-Broadcast-September-2012/ba-p/6116904.
4. Tim Brown, “OpenIdeo,” Design Thinking, August 1, 2010, designthinking.ideo.com/?p=482.
5. For details see OpenIdeo website, www.OpenIDEO.com/open/impact/realisation.
6. Case study: OpenIdeo, “Case Study: OpenIdeo,” AIGA (November 9, 2011), www.aiga.org/case-study-OpenIDEO.