Product innovation

Topics include

• Which new features would be best for a new product
• Assess the revenue potential product ideas by putting a quantitative sales estimate to each idea before deciding to invest
• Use the wisdom of the Crowd to quickly narrow down a list of hundreds of employee-generated or customer-generated ideas to the most promising ideas
• Work with proven lead users in developing new product ideas

The CrowdWorx Innovation Engine

Incorporating Crowdsourcing in the product innovation process: Innovation Engline slides.

• Suggest: Everybody can contribute ideas - knowing that they will be evaluated later on, which is already a major incentive to propose good ideas.
• Vote: With a suggestion box you can easily generate hundreds of ideas - too many for all of them to be considered. A simple voting mechanism selects the most promissing ideas.
• Evaluate: Each idea which made it to this step is now evaluated. Still, computing a business case for dozens of ideas is not feasable - unless you use the CrowdWorx EPM mechanism to collect the collective knowledge of all your employees. CrowdWorx will generate forecasts for KPIs like development cost, development time, lifetime sales potential etc.

CrowdWorx benefits

Assume you have conducted a customer server or an employee survey for new product ideas. The survey is a huge success with hundreds of new ideas. But: You can’t implement all those ideas. How are you going to select the best ideas? You would have to keep someone busy for months to go through all the ideas and still have to trust this person that it will not overlook some promising ideas.

• With CrowdWorx you can harness the Wisdom of the Crowd and quickly assess a large list of ideas
• You will have more than just one opinion on the ideas
• You will get a quantitative rating for each idea, e.g. development cost, development time, lifetime sales potential etc.
• Finally, you are creating buy-in for the new development effort “as you go” by involving your employees (or customers) in the selection process

Last but not least: Participants who consistently bet on the best ideas can be thought of as proven lead-users. You cannot identify such people by rank or with survey. CrowdWorx unveils who “really knows” and helps you get in touch with these experts after you have identified them with the CrowdWorx mechanism.

Possible participants

If you have large lists of ideas, you need a lot of participants. At the same time you have to make sure to include not just your customers but also your employees who will bring in a different perspective into the assessment of an idea, i.e. its feasibility. For example, a large commercial airplane might be a great business idea but it might be out of your company’s capabilities to construct a plane.

Things to keep in mind

In product innovation you typically have no real-world outcome so you have a problem to define a clear incentive to your participants. In the worst case you could end up running a so called “Keynesian Beauty Contest” – a technical term in Economics which describes a situation of irrational group action, herding and bubbles in stock markets. To prevent this you should set a carefully designed incentive scheme – which is still easy to understand. Not an easy task to do. One part of it could be to disallow people to assess ideas they contributed themselves or to introduce a second incentive: Not only the ideas themselves are rated but also the person which suggested the ideas which got the highest collective rating, will be rewarded. That way you give people an incentive to propose only good ideas because they know that their ideas will be rated by everybody (except themselves).