Helios Blue Release Notes, Summer 2010

The Helios Blue release of IdeaNet™, the leading social media tool for connecting ideas to knowledge to people, brings you some amazing new functionality and some significant design and performance improvements.

icon_mobile_120MOBILE VERSION

Weʼre all spending less time at our desks, more time out and about and we know ideas tend to strike in the most unlikely places. So Helios Blue incorporates mobile access to IdeaNet™. Weʼve developed an optimised mobile version that allows you to post ideas, enrich and evaluate them. It works on the iPhone and Android, and we’re currently testing it for use on Blackberry and other mobile platforms.

icon_activity_120ACTIVITY STREAM

We know how important it is to keep up to date in the fast moving world of innovation so weʼve introduced an Activity Stream to IdeaNet™. This great new feature shows the most recent flow of ideas and enrichments at both idea and challenge level making it easier to keep up-to-date.

icon_dashboard_120DASHBOARD

Knowledge is power.  For innovation managers itʼs important to have essential challenge statistics at your fingertips.  So Helios Blue includes an all-new Dashboard providing essential statistics on group-level user activity.  Weʼve kept the interface clean and simple in line with our mission to create the most user friendly interface, so you can focus on the figures.

WidgetWEB WIDGET

If people donʼt know about a challenge, how can they take part? Communicating your challenge is vital and promoting it on your intranet really boosts participation.  Weʼve developed a Web Widget that shows the latest challenge activity. It can be easily embedded on other pages encouraging click through to your campaign.

DESIGN & PERFORMANCE

  • Helios Blue is the fastest performing release of IdeaNet™ to-date.  Weʼve used some cool and efficient database communication to improve the performance of the application.
  • Weʼve redesigned several pages to improve the user experience. Look out for our new labels. And weʼve made it easier to access the multi-lingual options.
  • For our SaaS clients you are no longer tied to the innovationhub.eu top-level domain but now have the option to provide us with the domain of your choice.

MORE INFORMATION

Helios Blue is now available and is being rolled out across all our clients.

For more information or for a demo contact our sales team.

July 23rd, 2010

Innovation Factory wins Dutch Interactive Award

Emerce DIA WinnerBusiness award for best intranet for social network ‘1Power’ of Achmea

During the presentation of the first Dutch Interactive Awards (DIA) – business award for Dutch Interactive companies – the innovation platform ‘1Power’ of Innovation Factory was awarded with the prize for best interactive intranet.

The Dutch innovation stimulator developed the platform in 2007 in cooperation with Achmea to connect employees of all different divisions and brands of Achmea and facilitate them with a tool to share their knowledge.

The awards were granted in the categories: e-commerce, online services, leadgen (sales), intranet, corporate, recruitment (communications) and campaignsite, brandsite and communities (marketing). All entries were judged on the aspects needed for a successful internet project: strategy, design and development.

Knowledge of employees too often under utilised

Innovation Factory not only developed the platform but also stimulates involvement of employees on the platform. Jaap Linssen, Director of Community Management of Innovation Factory: “Employees of Achmea help each other to solve problems and to test and enrich ideas on the platform. We succeeded in creating a very vibrant community that benefits the entire organisation. Because it has become much easier to share ideas and support each other, the intellectual capital of the company can be utilised more effectively. The chance of successfully developing ideas has improved significantly.”

Results better than expected

“The effect of facilitating colleagues in a social network like ‘1Power’ has exceeded our expectations. Three years ago no one expected the benefits of this many ambitious and involved employees actively participating on the platform to be so significant.”, says Sjaak van Heukelum, Director Innovation at Achmea.

About Innovation Factory

Innovation Factory is a Dutch based software and consulting firm founded by professor Han Gerrits (VU University Amsterdam), specialised in innovation strategy and technology. Since 2005 Innovation Factory helps companies with the collection, management and implementation of new ideas. By means of consulting, training and the development of special software, Innovation Factory supports organisations to become successful innovators. Innovation Factory changes mindsets, wins hearts and minds of employees and clients, and acts as partner in innovation projects of companies as TNT Post, Achmea and UPC. www.innovationfactory.eu

May 31st, 2010

Achmea 1POWER nominated for Emerce Dutch Interactive Award

1POWER1POWER, the Achmea Innovation Community managed by Innovation Factory has been nominated for the Dutch Interactive Award (DIA) in the category Best Intranet. Commissioned by the Eureko board in 2007, 1POWER has enabled Achmea employees to connect to their colleagues and share knowledge. This has helped establish a more innovative organisation and has promoted collaboration between the various business units. Innovation Factory manages the 1POWER community and regularly facilitates 1POWER workshops and events. The 1POWER website was developed by Innovation Factory and runs on our InnvationHub platform.

More details on the nomination on the DIA website. Read more about 1POWER in the 1POWER case description.

Additionally, we have recently welcomed the 1000th 1POWER member. To celebrate this milestone 1POWER has recently been updated with a new design as shown on the left, and various new functionalities that will help the community thrive.

May 10th, 2010

Fail and learn to innovate

In a recent blog post on the Innovate on Purpose blog, the author Jeffrey Philips borrows a famous quote from Winston Churchill and bends it towards the field of Innovation: “Innovation success is based on going from “failure” to “failure” without a loss of enthusiasm.” In a lot of companies he writes, the fear of failing inevitably creeps in. This is very true. Personally, I think this stems from the fact that people responsible for a project/idea more or less connect their career to the project. From experience with different innovation projects I would suggest to take a step back and let ideas roam through the company to evolve more. At Innovation Factory we like to see ideas as a seed.

Most often ideas need some attention and enrichments from others to grow to a more mature state before a good decision can be made whether an idea should be picked up to start a project. Hence the seed-metaphor; a seed also needs some attention and enrichment (water) to grow. The nice thing about the upcoming social software tools (Enterprise2.0 software) is that they suit this approach very well. First of all with tools like idea management software it is very easy for employees, and possibly suppliers and clients as well, to contribute ideas. But the real difference stems from the fact that you can use the collective brainpower to enrich (or grow) these ideas. A third interesting aspect of these type of tools is the fact that ideas (and their enrichments) get stored online. So far my story about software tools, because as the name implies they are merely the tools to become more innovative; It’s all about the way you use these tools whether your company will be successful at innovating.

To come back to the failure aspect, another quote in this context is very apt. It is a quote from Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, directed to his employees: “I hope you fail often and I hope you fail fast”. As I described before, Google is a very innovative company. What Schmidt implies with his statement is that he wants Google employees to try out a lot of new ideas. In his quote the company culture is pronounced that it doesn’t matter if you make mistakes or formulate an idea that won’t make it. It is part of the process to come to new successful products or services as long as you learn from the mistakes and failures. The more you fail, the more you learn; while the faster you fail, less costs are made to learn. This learning from failures and uncovering rapidly whether an idea is worth an investment in time and money to develop further is very well supported by social tools like idea management software. Like stated before, all the failures (ideas that won’t make it now) are stored online. So others that come up with the same idea at a later stage won’t have to spend time and money to do research for that idea. While over time, the market might have changed or new technologies might have come available and an idea that was rejected before might be great to develop now.

Probably the most crucial aspect in the above described situation is creating a company culture where failure is not punished but stimulated. A CEO stating that exact message is a very important drive for a company to become more innovative.

April 27th, 2010 by Jurjan Huisman

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How do you get people to share their knowledge?

Screen shot 2010-01-13 at 18.27.00Internal communities help people within an enterprise solve problems faster and more effectively. A vibrant community, which brings together people from across the organisation will also generate more innovation.

A key component of the community is the ability of people to access knowledge already available within the company. Knowledge can be found by searching the community platform for stored knowledge or to locate the people that posses, or have access to it. Having immediate access to such knowledge leads primarily to a reduction in the (re)search costs incurred (you don’t need to hire external expertise so often). In situations where access to the shared knowledge of a community is not available, time to research a subject increases dramatically along with costs. In the communities we manage we have seen savings of hundreds of business research and analysis hours on a single subject.

Such a system provides great benefits both for the organization and for the individuals. This should be reason enough for people to contribute to the community. In reality, however, it proves to be tremendously difficult to motivate people to help colleagues and lift these constraints on sharing knowledge. There are many reasons that govern this reluctance. Many aspects are psychological, such as fear of not being taken seriously or fear of losing the monopoly on that knowledge. Such psychological factors are complex to manage and take time and trust, to change for the better.

There is one factor that has great impact on improving access to knowledge, that can be managed quite easily. Instead of asking people to actually answer a question, you describe your ‘knowledge need’ and ask people that could help you to make themselves known. By doing this you start to build a ‘knowledge network’. These knowledge networks are very powerful in giving people access to knowledge. You can think of them like hyperlinks on the web pointing to relevant sources, only this time the links point to relevant people. Besides being a powerful way to unlock knowledge this method also helps lift the constraints on sharing I described earlier. People no longer have to be scared of losing their monopoly on knowledge as they remain the gatekeeper. Further, the time investment to indicate you have such knowledge is negligible. In our active communities we also see signs that it actually encourages people to share as it’s a way to profile themselves as an expert within the organisation.

At one of our clients an employee was asked to work on search engine optimization (SEO) for the website of a specific division. She posted a request for help on the internal community asking who had experience implementing SEO for a website. Five specialists replied that they had experience and would be happy to help out. Recounting her experience, she reflected that access to the knowledge of these people had saved her at least two months work and she had no need to hire external experts to get her going. Furthermore, in the future anyone with questions about SEO just has to search for the term and will have access to the knowledge in an instant.

So how do you create the environment in which this can happen? You need to shift the paradigm in peoples’ minds that you do not have to share the knowledge itself. We find that the best way of doing so is to set the example by sourcing two or three knowledge requests and asking a number of experts to make themselves known. Once a few strong cases are visible people catch on very quickly.

April 14th, 2010 by Jaap Linssen

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Case: ROI of Internal Communities

This case describes a bottom up innovation initiative at a large Dutch insurance company. The case shows that bottom up innovation in large enterprises through the use of an internal community, results in lower costs and an improvement of the speed and quality of the first 2 stages of the Stage-gate process.
Bottom up innovation is the concept where ideas ‘bubble up’ from anywhere in the organisation. Employees lead the idea through the innovation process by utilising relations based upon knowledge, experience, and influence in their network and not so much by navigating company hierarchies.

Bottom up innovationThis case describes a bottom up innovation initiative at a large Dutch insurance company. The case shows that bottom up innovation in large enterprises through the use of an internal community, results in lower costs and an improvement of the speed and quality of the first 2 stages of the Stage-gate process.

It also suggests that, compared to the traditional way of innovating, it increases the innovation momentum within the organisation leading to more and better quality ideas and eventually a more innovative, collaborative culture within the organisation.

Bottom up innovation is the concept where ideas ‘bubble up’ from anywhere in the organisation. Employees lead the idea through the innovation process by utilising relations based upon knowledge, experience, and influence in their network and not so much by navigating company hierarchies.

Download here: Bottom_up_innovation

April 7th, 2010 by Jaap Linssen

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TNT Post betrekt medewerkers op actieve wijze bij innovatie-ontwikkeling

TNTTNT Post gaat met behulp van de expertise van Innovation Factory uit Amsterdam voortaan al zijn medewerkers nog actiever betrekken bij de innovatieve ontwikkeling van zijn producten en diensten.
Beide partijen hebben onlangs daartoe een samenwerkingscontract ondertekend. Het bedrijf is overtuigd van de kracht van de kennis en ideeën van zijn medewerkers en wil hen actief betrekken bij innovaties. Het door Innovation Factory ontwikkelde ideeën-managementsysteem IdeaNet™ helpt met het (virtueel) verbinden van de medewerkers binnen een bedrijf, waardoor er veel meer kennis en expertise beschikbaar komt. Dit leidt tot snellere, goedkopere en efficiëntere innovatie. Eerder kozen ook Achmea, Vodafone Group en UPC voor deze technologie en ondersteuning.

Innoveren met elkaar
Ger Jacobs, Commercieel Directeur TNT Post: “Om vooruit te blijven lopen op de ontwikkelingen in onze markt en leidend te blijven met onze dienstverlening is innovatie het sleutelwoord. Innovatie vraagt echter niet alleen om woorden, maar ook om daden. Wij verwachten dat we door samen te werken met Innovation Factory meer innovatiekracht uit onze medewerkers kunnen halen. Met IdeaNet™ creëren we een eigen social community waarbij collega’s actief, op directe en open wijze hun ervaringen en ideeën delen om processen of producten te verbeteren, en om nieuwe productideeën te ontwikkelen. Die community staat niet in een dag. Dit vraagt om actieve stimulatie en betrokkenheid van collega’s en hun directe management. Om dit proces op gang te brengen en te houden, blijft Innovation Factory aan de zijlijn betrokken en organiseren ze bijvoorbeeld ook een speciale sessie om ideeëndeling met elkaar op gang te brengen. In het eerste jaar zullen zij helpen met het vaststellen van relevante innovatiethema’s waarbinnen het ideeënproces van start kan gaan.”

Begeleiding van idee tot product
Han Gerrits, oprichter en CEO van Innovation Factory: “We zijn erg blij met de aanpak van TNT Post. Ze zien heel goed in dat ideeën uit alle hoeken van een organisatie kunnen komen en willen dat op termijn collega’s in de hele organisatie verbonden zijn aan de community. Ze vragen daarvoor onze actieve begeleiding, van het idee tot de ontwikkeling en productlancering, waardoor er steeds slimmer met budget, tijd, arbeidskapitaal en innovatiekansen omgegaan kan worden en de kans op succesvolle, baanbrekende ideeën wordt vergroot.”

Over Innovation Factory
Het software- en adviesbedrijf Innovation Factory is opgericht door professor Han Gerrits (VU University Amsterdam), gespecialiseerd in innovatiestrategie en technologie. Innovation Factory helpt sinds 2005 bedrijven met het opzetten van innovatie communities. Door het (virtueel) verbinden van de medewerkers binnen een bedrijf komt er veel meer kennis en expertise beschikbaar, dit leidt tot snellere, goedkopere en efficiëntere innovatie. Door adviezen, training en speciale software ondersteunt Innovation Factory organisaties om succesvolle innovators te worden. Innovation Factory verandert mindsets en overtuigt medewerkers en klanten om zo als partner een innovatiecultuur op te bouwen. Dit doet Innovation Factory onder andere bij bedrijven als Vodafone Group, TNT Post, Achmea en UPC. www.innovationfactory.eu

Over TNT Post
TNT Post verwerkt dagelijks 16 miljoen poststukken (waarvan 400.000 pakketten) met ruim 7,6 miljoen bestemmingen in Nederland. Het bedrijf is ook actief in andere Europese landen en Azië. Van groeiend belang zijn diensten die elektronische data omzetten in fysieke post. TNT Post is in de eerste plaats actief op het gebied van post: collectie, sortering, transport en aflevering van brieven en pakketten. Daarnaast is de onderneming gespecialiseerd in data- en documentdiensten, direct mail, e-commerce en internationale post. TNT Post heeft zo’n 58.000 mensen in dienst in Nederland. De omzet van TNT Post over het derde kwartaal 2009 bedroeg 956 miljoen euro. TNT Post is onderdeel van TNT N.V.  www.tntpost.nl

April 6th, 2010

Epic cycling tours and crowdsourcing

Screen shot 2010-03-25 at 2.49.28 PMThrough Springwise I ran into an initiative of Tour d’Afrique Ltd. a Toronto based company named for its flagship cycling tour that annually traverses the African continent from Cairo to Cape Town. They have started to crowdsource cycling tours through an operation they call Dream Tours.

The text on their homepage: “Do you have a dream expedition on a bike that you would like to have others to join you on, help you get it off the ground and share the costs? Do you have a dream tour that you wish someone would help you implement it? DreamTours will revolutionize the way cycling tours around the world are created. You create your DreamTour and the community around the world makes it a reality.”

Crowdsourcing is hot, however getting it to work for you is not easy. I believe this initiative is aligned well to be successful. I’ll discuss a number of prerequisites for successful crowdsourcing and community management.

The community is passionate

These guys organise life experience cycle tours. They started with Cairo to Cape Town tour. A trip of 12.000 km in 120 days. They now have 5 of such epic journeys in their program. The people participating in such events have to be passionate. If you ask people with passion to come up with their dream, you’re bound to get interesting input. Currently there are 25 proposed tours.

The community is focussed but there is enough room for creativity

A very difficult aspect to deal with when you engage the crowd is to give them enough focus without destroying creativity. A mistake many companies make when asking the crowd for input is that they formulate the question/challenge broadly to get as many diverse ideas as possible. Such lack of focus is often detrimental for the quality of ideas. You get too many irrelevant ideas. The low quality will scare people away as they are not willing to invest energy into something of such poor quality. Furthermore, in such cases you also see the organisation itself lose interest and the initiative dies. So you need to apply focus. The level of focus correlates with the passion the community has for the subject. The more passion, the more you can apply focus. I believe Dream Tours has found the right balance. The only thing people are asked to do is plot a trip or in other words their dream. The planning and organisation is done by Dream Tours if the route gets enough buy in from the community.

What’s in it for me?

One of the key aspects in having a lively community is answering the “What’s in it for me?” question for the people you would like to contribute. If it isn’t clear how people can benefit from contributing, they will not. The benefit can be as straight forward as prize money or more intangible like feeling good about yourself. “What’s in it for me?” also correlates with the passion of the community; talking about something you love is very satisfying to most people. Not sufficiently addressing this subject is the number one reason for failing communities.

In this case, the answer to the ‘What’s in it for me?’ question is very clear. You get to plan and share your dream journey. If your journey is selected and enough people sign in, you have the option to ride for free or share this prize with the others as a group discount.

How can the Dream Tours community improve?

A powerful way to improve the quality of ideas generated by the community or spin of new ideas is what we call ‘enrichment’. Others enrich ideas that were posted previously. In our practice we usually witness that the true brakethrough comes from insights other people add to the ideas. For Dream Tours, I imagined that people would go crazy enriching the tours proposed by others. Enrichments such as special sites to visit, special mountains to climb, etc. There is no real enrichment activity on Dream Tours. I would suggest Dream Tours to start inviting their members to enrich each others tours. And why stop there? Why don’t they also put their own tours in the community for others to be enriched?

March 25th, 2010 by Jaap Linssen

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Innovation Factory on TV

Recently an item regarding Innovation Factory was aired on the Amsterdam television channel AT5. The interview features Han Gerrits, CEO of Innovation Factory, and Sjaak van Heukelum, Innovation Manager at Achmea. They talk about enabling employees to innovate and in particular the successful case of an on-line innovation community at Achmea: 1Power.

The interview (in Dutch) can also be found at the website of Amsterdam Inc.

March 15th, 2010

Social Media for Internal Communications: treat or threat?

Interne communicatieDid you already sign up for the 13th edition of the ‘Praktijkcongres Interne Communicatie’? The biggest Congress on Internal Communications in the Netherlands will be held on April 13th in the Congress center of Amstelveen. The theme of the congress this year: Social Media for Internal Communications: treat or threat? Innovation Factory will be present as one of the exhibitioners and will demonstrate how wikis and social media platforms can contribute in internal communication.

Social media such as twitter, facebook, blogs and wikis are THE topic of the day. Also for internal communication purposes because they offer wonderful opportunities to enlarge the loyalty and commitment of employees. On the other hand they also bring reputation risks because of transparency. Therefore the theme of this years congress holds the duality treat or threat. You will get an overview of the possibilities and risks of social media, the impact they have on the role of the IC Manager and of course lots of practical experiences and cases.

Chairman is Internal Communications goeroe and author of the book: ‘Twitteren in your company’: Huib Koeleman. There will be speakers from: Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties, Achmea, Microsoft, Politie Brabant Zuid-Oost, Getronics, Hogeschool Arnhem & Nijmegen, Vodafone, Gemeente Amsterdam, TNT Post and Ministerie van Defensie.

Next to the Congress there are Masterclasses on April 14 (Social Media for dialogue and commitment), April 15 (Online Reputation Management) and June 1 (How to help business managers communicating effectively).

For further information: www.corner-stone.nl

March 8th, 2010

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