Crowdsourcing with Confluence
netoCiety has developed a crowdsourcing bundle for use within Confluence, NetOvation.
If you would like to discuss how your organisation could apply netOvation, please contact us for a demonstration.
...The History Behind netOvation
netoCiety began developing netOvation after many conversations led to the inevitable question..."Wouldn't it be great if you could gather and manage ideas using Confluence?" and so netOvation was born. This page and it's children pages area record of the thinking behind the development of netOvation.
Inspiration
Many websites are now focussed on ideation or idea gathering on a mass scale supporting open innovation programmes. Here are some examples.
Ideas into Action
How do you turn ideas into action? Communities are often a great source of ideas - capturing and exploiting them successfully is critical for innovation.
- Scanning for and Identification of the Idea.
- Packaging the Idea
- Advocating the Idea
- Make It Happen. Key to making it happen is:
- Ideas need to show a quick payoff, so keep track of financial costs and benefits;
- A fast win may actually be a loss; major change involves working on foundations, which takes time;
- Every idea needs an implementation plan if it's going to go anywhere;
- Tie the execution of the idea into performance appraisals and promotions;
- Experiment, then scale up;
- Unqualified successes are those in which the new ideas are useful to individual workers' jobs (so the fit has to be perfect or the idea or the job must be redesigned);
- At some point, you have to know when to get out of the way and let others execute.
- Take the Idea External
Brainstorming
In late 2007 we started brainstorming around idea gathering and innovation. Here are some of our thoughts.
NOTE: Interesting article from the BusinessWeek Wikinomics series to take into consideration:
Ideagora, a Marketplace for Minds
Ideas and innovations are increasingly coming from outside company walls?and Web-based virtual talent pools are stepping in to fill the need
Making it happen is key!
"Critics of communities and other ad hoc groups often complain that nothing comes out of these groups but ideas. They believe that communities are nothing more than think tanks, spinning out one creative but unusable idea after another. At worst, these critics believe that they are a complete waste of time."
Steve Benton and Melissa Giovagnoli, authors of "The Wisdom Network: An 8-step process for Identifying, Sharing, and Leveraging Individual Expertise", recommend four ways to turn talk into action...
1. Create a new project team - a network can identify the people who are best able to make the group's idea happen.
2. Latch on to an existing similar project or program - when it seems unlikely that a project team will receive approval or when requests are tuned down, this is a viable option.
3. Launch a short-lived task force - this is a pre-implementation step, but one that may greatly increase the odds that a network's idea is executed successfully.
4. Take the idea back to where you came from - someone in the network may be in the perfect position to bring the idea back to his or her team or function and let them pilot test it or move it forward in some way.
When a netwok hits on an idea that excites everyone, the next step is always to figure out the best way to test and use it.