Keep Your Ideas Fresh! Adoption & Engagement in Collaborative Systems

Sometimes it's appropriate to be fresh! Let's face it; you periodically refresh your
web site and your slide deck template.

Collaborative innovation systems go through evolutionary stages. Sometimes the connections are self forming (when
we find those with common areas of interest by accident), other times because
the administrators of the systems nudge people into useful clusters. The actual process of collaboration only
works if there's a point to the exercise: a goal; a reason for people to log in
and touch bases.

With collaborative systems for innovation, users ask themselves
'Why should I visit the site'? And if
there is value to be found there, they'll show up and jump in. Perhaps because I know everybody posts their
white papers there, or there's an RSS feed to an industry magazine I like, or
maybe I know there's a conversation there I find appealing.

Let's digress for a moment and talk about something most of
us are familiar with: Facebook. Way back when we all logged in, we tried a
bunch of new things. Facebook administrators
responded and kept tweaking the portals' appearance and functionality based on
statistical analysis of usage behavior.
Nowadays a lot of people have peeled away, while others stop by every
day to check in with a small cadre of those with common interests.

So maybe they see what their friends did yesterday or last
night. They see what new pictures people
posted. They comment or engage in a dialogue
about a topic. Then they log off. Maybe they log in later for the same routine;
or maybe they wait until tomorrow.

Once in a while 'big news' happens or someone amongst their friends
posts something provocative. Then there's
a flurry of comments, discussions and collateral postings. Then the topic loses its allure and people
settle back into their daily routine.

Collaborative systems for innovation are similar. First off Corporate Managers worry about
adoption and engagement. This means they
think about how to lure users in from on line arenas where they dwell. So users get a link in an email 'Please give
me your thoughts on this, click here'!
Or users discover a URL in a private corporate twitter feed with 'I just
posted a new idea, please give me your comments, click here'.

When they arrive in the collaborative innovation portal,
corporate administrators think about how to cluster users. They use 'persuasive guidance' to lure the user's
eye and clicking fingers to where they want the 'call to action'.

Maybe there's a 'team' dedicated to a discipline (e.g.
engineers, marketing people click here) or to a topic (e.g. those who want to
talk about carbon bonding issues, or Latin American markets click here'). Or maybe they encourage participation in an
activity (e.g. please use our General Idea Box or Click Here to Join our
Brainstorm Week!).

Some of these collaborative engagements have used multiple time
zones and the discussion morphs as the work week progresses. Other groups dive into a real time discussion
forum where one user poses an acute question requiring a rapid solution and
everybody else jumps in. This is sort of
an electronic brainstorming session that just keeps going on. There easily can be multiple 'rooms' with different
topics being discussed.

So like Facebook again, users typically log into collaborative innovation systems for one of
three reasons:

'Let's change the layout, the colors, and the team names. Let's
come up with an exciting interesting challenge. Let's open this discussion to a new group of
people. Let's ask our vendors or our
partners, or our customers or the public to join the conversation; to provide
input; to give us their ideas.'

The point is: corporate collaborative innovation systems or
Idea Management Systems need to be administered, monitored, analyzed, modified and
tweaked on an ongoing bases.

A successful innovation system keeps changing 'the point of
interest' to make everyday fresh, new and interesting. A successful collaborative innovation system
will work hard to help users satisfy their users' intellectual curiosity.

As I said earlier, sometimes it's appropriate to be fresh.

Ron Shulkin is Vice President of the Americas for
CogniStreamer', an innovation ecosystem.
CogniStreamer serves as a Knowledge Management System, Idea Management
System and Social Network for Innovation.
You can learn more about CogniStreamer here http://bit.ly/ac3x60

Ron manages The Idea Management Group on LinkedIn (Join
Here) http://bit.ly/ideamg .

CogniStreamer' is a Knowledge Management system, an idea
management software tool'in fact a social network dedicated to innovation. It is an open innovation and collaboration
platform where internal colleagues and external partner companies or knowledge
centers join forces to create, develop and assess innovative ideas within
strategically selected areas. The CogniStreamer' portal is an ideal
collaborative platform that invites users to actively build a strong innovation
portfolio. In addition it provides a powerful resource for internal and
external knowledge sharing.
The CogniStreamer' framework is used by industry leaders such as
Atlas Copco, Bekaert, Case New Holland, Cytec, Imec, Phillip Morris, Picanol
and ThyssenKrupp. CogniStreamer' represents the best use of adaptive
collaborative technology to harness human skill, ingenuity and intelligence.