Today's New York Times brings this article from William C. Taylor, entitled "Here's An Idea: Let Everyone Have Ideas." Taylor, a co-founder of Fast Company magazine, adroitly combines several key business memes in the piece.
First, he presents the case of an internal "stock market" operating at Rite-Solutions, a Newport, Rhode Island software development company. Founders James R. Lavoie and Joseph M. Martino adapted to their company an idea that has been bandied about a good deal over the past several years by everyone from Jim Surowiecki to DARPA: "idea futures." The notion comes from Robin Hanson's pioneering work dating back to the early 90s. Simply put: networked groups demonstrate support for an idea's potential by placing "bets." The better the idea, the more bets it draws.
Even though the idea's been around for a while, few organizations have embraced it (at least not publicly) as strongly as Rite-Solutions. Why? Listen to co-founcer Lavoie:
"We're the founders, but we're far from the smartest people here," Mr. Lavoie, the chief executive, said during an interview at Rite-Solutions' headquarters outside Newport, R.I. "At most companies, especially technology companies, the most brilliant insights tend to come from people other than senior management. So we created a marketplace to harvest collective genius."
Don't hear that very often, do you? I don't.
Second, Lavoie and Marino borrowed a page from the open source software movement by developing what Tim O'Reilly calls an "architecture of participation." For the past decade, we at TrueTalk have helped our clients think about their organization as a "social system." Our goal has been to encourage and aid them to design and manage that system in ways that will enhance the kinds of interactions that will deliver the results they need to be successful. (That's why the tagline for this blog is: "Connecting People For Results.") Rite-Solutions shows that kind of thinking in action.
Third, Taylor points out that establishing internal conversations is only part of the story.
The next frontier is to tap the quiet genius that exists outside organizations — to attract innovations from people who are prepared to work with a company, even if they don't work for it. An intriguing case in point is InnoCentive, a virtual research and development lab through which major corporations invite scientists and engineers worldwide to contribute ideas and solve problems they haven't been able to crack themselves.
InnoCentive, based in Andover, Mass., is literally a marketplace of ideas. It has signed up more than 30 blue-chip companies, including Procter & Gamble, Boeing and DuPont, whose research labs are groaning under the weight of unsolved problems and unfinished projects. It has also signed up more than 90,000 biologists, chemists and other professionals from more than 175 countries. These "solvers" compete to meet thorny technical challenges posted by "seeker" companies. Each challenge has a detailed scientific description, a deadline and an award, which can run as high as $100,000.
I wrote about this under the label, "permeability," in this recent post. The point is, purely internally-driven innovation is an old model, signaled by the presence of product/process leader P&G in the InnoCentive experiment.
Make no mistake, this kind of thinking takes special leaders. It is not easy to lead in circumstances in which open ideal exchanges prevail; exercising power is too tempting. For that reason, more often than not, what we see is impermeability, leader resistance in the form of "not invented here," "what do they know?" or (much more frequently than you'd still imagine), "just do what you're told."
By contrast, imagine going to work for your first day at Rite-Solutions and reading this on the company web site:
“From Day One, every new employee can see what we collectively believe the future technologies will be and where they’ll be applied by us, so they can chart their own career path within the company,” Lavoie says. And, he notes, “there’s no real management ‘disapproval’ loop, which often is the gauntlet employees feel they have to run if they want to propose new ideas.”
“We think this has huge potential in the emerging knowledge-harvesting market,” he says.
What we're seeing is a powerful convegence of ideas: social networking; rapid idea generation, evaluation, and harvesting; organizational permeability. And, while there are certainly circumstances in which the work of an individual genius will change everything, tapping collective genius is a notion whose time has definitely come.
What is your company doing about it?
Tags: William C. Taylor Rite-Solutions Open Source Innovation
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