Use Online Communities to Find Breakthrough Ideas
When Meow Mix wanted to find new ideas, they went out of their own litter box to talk directly to their audience. The bowl of milk they put out to attract cat lovers? An online community.
Many companies are looking beyond old fashioned focus groups to the Web to learn what their target audiences are thinking. And these interactive online groups can be a rich new source of ideas and suggestions.
The challenge, though, is not coming up with new ideas, but rather recognizing, refining and prioritizing true breakthroughs and innovations. The good news is that there are ways to corral all this explosive, creative energy.
Idea Overload
A Google search for “innovation management” turns up more than 23 million results. Research shows that for every “big” idea, there are often 50 mediocre ones—and companies can spend millions turning an idea into an actual product.
So while ideas are abundant, true innovation is still the toughest challenge many companies face. But the need to innovate has never been more urgent. Most retail and consumer product companies are experiencing an increasing rate of market fragmentation. Many corporate leaders understand that innovation in their products, services, operations and communications is what separates the winners from the losers. That’s why the top 1,000 research and development spenders invested $447 billion on new-product development in 2006, according to the Booz Allen Hamilton Global Innovation 1000 report.
What’s more, breakthrough innovations are much more richly rewarded than incremental product improvements. A recent McKinsey study shows that true breakthroughs earn much greater market share than simple line extensions or incremental improvements.
Online communities can generate massive quantities of new ideas. For example, the “MyStarbucksIdea.com” site regularly produces up to 300 ideas per hour and as many as 7,200 ideas every 30 days. Similarly, Dell’s IdeaStorm site has generated more than 9,000 ideas and 71,000 comments from the Dell community to date.
But simply increasing the number of ideas in the pipeline is not enough. Too often, so-called idea management technologies and online suggestion sites have turned out to be little more than vast graveyards for ideas that never see the light of day. Companies may find themselves awash in a sea of ideas with no way to separate the good from the bad or transform raw ideas into real products. An article in Research Technology Management suggested that in a typical ideation process, it can take 3,000 raw ideas to create one commercial success—and finding that one success is no easy feat.
What’s the solution? To effectively drive innovation through online communities, companies should focus on two main goals. First, create a true community of diverse, engaged and invested participants who participate out of a genuine interest. Second, focus the community’s efforts by systematically guiding them to work together to refine and build out winning ideas.
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Creating an Engaged and Invested Community
Web sites acting as online suggestion boxes where members submit and read ideas and then go on their way are not true communities. True communities bring members together, offer them a rich and varied experience and nurture ongoing participation. True communities derive power from their members’ continued willingness to share opinions and work together over time.
Unfortunately, while community engagement and collective decision-making are what help bring winning ideas to life, they rarely happen organically. To keep members coming back, the community experience must stimulate creativity, provide avenues to explore concepts and thoughts, and promote authentic interaction and exchange.
Ways to encourage community engagement:
- Stimulate creativity through topics, polls, chatsand forums. Introduce members to topics and themes via message boards, chat rooms or blogs. Change the topic frequently to keep people coming back. Give users forums to discuss with their peers topics of their own choosing.
- Recognize contributions through reputation systems. Award points and assign reputation levels to members based on the quality of their participation as recognized by their community peers. These systems help members feel incented to participate and gain recognition from the community.
- Enable collaboration through subscriptions. Make it possible for people to follow the progress of their ideas (or those of others) via e-mail notifications and threaded discussions. This enables members to form virtual workgroups around an idea, so all interested parties track and collaborate around a concept as it evolves.
- Create connections with member-to-member messaging. Enable members to send one another private messages through the community site. Nothing motivates return visits more than an inbox filled with messages from new friends.
Putting the Pieces Together
A great example of how one company put all the pieces together is Del Monte’s Meow Mix Brand Group. To ensure a robust pipeline of new product ideas, the company sought an influx of out-of-the-box ideas for innovative new products. Instead of relying solely on consultants and small internal teams, the company invited 650 cat owners to join an online community—nicknamed the “Meow Mixer” group––to collectively participate in the ideation process.
The fully managed and moderated site is a place where consumers come to contribute ideas, directly respond to moderator-presented themes (such as “eco-friendly foods” or “on-the-go snacks”), and evaluate, rate and refine ideas. The hottest ideas bubble to the top, are turned into concepts and then tested with quantitative survey research, a process that makes ideas better and more feasible for the company to bring to market.
In just eight weeks, the Meow Mixer community generated more than 300 ideas, 15 of which were turned into “champion” concepts for testing. Eleven ideas passed standard screening criteria for purchase intent. Results so far indicate that ideas from the community are passing concept screens at a highly successful rate and are surpassing ideas from other sources in terms of uniqueness. Going forward, this process will enable the brand and research departments to more quickly identify ideas with true potential for success and potentially save resources as these ideas move through the product development process.
Turning Ideas into Action
Even the most engaged and invested community can get off-track. With so many activities to participate in and so many ideas to review, community members can lose focus. In addition, community members are typically left to build out ideas on their own through short comments about what they like or don’t like, but these comments rarely provide insight about why an idea is or isn’t appealing to the group After all, it’s one thing to give your opinion, it’s quite another to work collaboratively to transform ideas into a complete and defined solution that can be taken to market.
A more useful and successful approach is one with a clear director and process for the development of ideas––call it guided idea development. With this approach, a moderator helps identify the best ideas based on community comments and ratings and then guides members’ to consider specific, critically important aspects of a solution in order to tweak it and make it better. For example, the moderator may ask the community where they would expect to purchase a proposed product, what they would be willing to pay for it or what similar products they have seen in the marketplace. This means that all members of the community––from outside customers and consumers to internal R&D to sales and marketing––have a chance to weigh in, provide feedback, share potential concerns and help move the best ideas to the next phase.
Emily Morris is director of product marketing, online communities, for MarketTools.
