Tapping The Crowd For Innovation Within

This post was written by Jacob McNulty

BusinessWeek just published an article that talks about incorporating people that aren’t formally part of your organization into it’s methods for innovating.  The article profiles a video game company that leveraged a fan-base on Facebook to create a new game – and along the way they slashed development costs and even a hired a few top coders.

This philosophy of ‘crowdsourcing’ will be critical as we get further into the knowledge economy.  I encourage organizations to assess who they count on for success and then develop strategies to incorporate all of those groups into their learning/innovation pipeline.  [Note: a value network analysis is a great tool to help visualize this.]

Who does your organization count on for success [i.e. suppliers, consultants, customers,...]?  How can you incorporate their insight and suggestions into your next big idea?

Tags: businessweek, collective intelligence, Communities of Practice, CoP, crowdsourcing, Facebook, knowledge economy, Knowledge Management, knowledge worker, learning innovation, managing innovation, new employee orientation, new employee orientation program, new hire orientation, New-Hire Integration, on boarding, open innovation, rapid on-boarding, social business design, social networking, sustainable innovation