Internal ecosystems and connections

Tapping internal resources

An often overlooked area where innovative ideas reside is the rank and file of the company. These are the people with a stake in the success of the company and have the deepest knowledge on the top customer concerns and how to get things done. Furthermore, by involving your own employees in innovation, they just might take more ownership of the work and be more productive.

Tools and policies

The most famous example is Google's Innovation Time Off where engineers are encourage to spend up to 20% of their time on a project that they feel passionate about. According to Marissa Mayer of Google, half of their new products in 2005, such as Gmail, can be traced the 20% time off.

Taking a different tact, Intuit, a finance/accounting software company, has built a product called Brainstorm as a way to foster, track, and guide employee innovation across the globe. I have talked with the team leader who built the product. Interestingly, part of its genesis came out of the desire to support and collaborate amongst team members for their own innovation ideas.

Three examples of connecting people

Connecting people

The most important thing in building and sustaining any community is that it brings value so that participants would come back for more. In the three examples below, beyond the formal conversations, it also fosters personal connections.

VPofEngineering/CTO Community of Practice

As the name implies, it is a technical cohort. Some of the recent discussion included lessons in re-architecting one of the US-wide content distribution network into cloud. The stated objective of this group is to solve problems, share business experience, and create opportunities.

Silicon Valley Innovation Executives

A group of executives and strategists chartered to bring external innovation into their companies. Recent conversations included what kind of ecosystem is needed to support intelligent vehicles and the best way for Silicon Valley based innovation outposts to communicate with company headquarters in Europe and Asia.

Stanford Product Realization Lab

A joint Engineering and Business school program at the Stanford University where students and alumni present their projects and venture ideas to a group of mentors from different industries and functional background for feedback and consultation.

Three case studies on connecting ecosystems

Innovation across ecosystems

Like most good ideas, innovations that connect disparate ecosystems can seem "obvious" as soon as they are explained. In the three examples below, the ecosystems go from very well defined one-to-one relationship between two companies, fairly well defined one-to-many relationship where a company leads the conversation, to a very loosely defined one-to-many relationship where no one entity can drive the agenda by itself.

BMW ConnectedDrive

Most of us have used a GPS system to navigte an unfamiliar terrain. Most of us have also used Google Maps to locate a new place before getting into a car. So, why not combine the two? BMW and Google talked, both side thought it was a cool feature, and viola!

See a video on how it works http://www.bmw.com/com/en/insights/technology/connecteddrive/online_google.html

Intuit's Entrepreneur Day

Intuit is a classic example of having strong distribution channels to customers. It hosts an annual Entrepreneur Day where companies are invited to pitch their product/ideas to the senior business leaders. It has a well choreographed process on how to manage this process, before, during, and after the Entrepreneur Day.

See a video with Intuit's CTO and VP of Open Innovation http://www.intuitcollaboratory.com/entrepreneur-day/

Google Labs

Google is known for shipping "beta" products. For example, Gmail for the longest time was in beta and access was by invitation only. But, these "beta" products are arguably in production grade already. So, where do the "alpha" products that feed into the "beta" funnel come from?

Instead of an internal only process, Google, and increasingly other organizations, are setting up open "labs" where new ideas can be exposed to the public and usage feedback collected. The idea being that you can make the kill v.s keep decision with higher degree confidence. Some of the "graduates" of the Google Labs include such notables as Google Alerts, something that I get everyday, and Google Maps, see BMW example above.

About Google Labs http://www.googlelabs.com/faq