In a true entrepreneurial spirit, quite a number of employees at Innovation Factory have their own side projects which they work on in the weekends and evenings. For one of those projects, Green at Work (in which I participate), a logo needed to be designed. It was done through Crowdspring, a crowd-sourcing platform. Even the seemingly simple process of having a logo designed by a crowd has many aspects of open innovation to it. I would like to share the experience with you and place it in the context of idea management.

Clear question
First of all, the logo design contest was initiated on Crowdspring.com with a preset running time of two weeks. To start a contest, Crowdspring has a submission form to describe your briefing. Their template takes you through a number of steps: You need to supply background information, what you need, who your target audience is, what kind of designs you like, and things you absolutely do or don’t want to have in your design. Before we started we observed that good briefings at other contests resulted in higher quality contributions so we took our time to write a good briefing.

Good feedback
It is vital to give supportive feedback to the people that contribute to your challenge. This feedback results in a higher quantity and quality of new submissions. This stems from the fact that people enrich each other’s designs based upon your feedback. Imagine one specific designer submits a design at Crowdspring and gets feedback from you that a specific element is really cool but another element definitely needs to be changed. If this happens a couple of times with different designs, new entrants will be better directed towards the type of design that you like. So in the end, people build upon each other’s submissions to come to higher quality submissions. In the end we received 197 design submissions of which the quality kept improving during the process.

Scout the community for input
You should scout through the profiles of the community members to find people you think can make a good contribution. We did this soon after we started our design challenge. We went through other design challenges and looked for designs that we liked and sent messages to the designers to tell them we liked their previous designs and asked them to participate in our challenge. Our eventual winner was someone we found in this way.

Diversity boosts creativity
Another great aspect of a community like Crowdspring is the fact that it’s members come from all over the world and have different backgrounds. Sure, they all do something with design, but compared to one specific design agency it’s a very diverse group. The resulting creative contributions are absolutely amazing. We selected the following design from a Japanese designer named Kiona:

Self-regulation within the community
At a certain point in the contest, one Crowdspring member even sent us a message that he found a similarity in one of the design submissions. He noticed that one of the submissions in our contest was a slightly altered copy of a submission from a different designer at a previous project. Obviously, copying is a complete no-go in a design process. So the community even helps to keep the contest ‘clean’. This is something that is hardly do-able without those extra hundreds pairs of eyes.

Idea management
In general, when you ask a community a question you leverage the principle: nobody is as smart as everybody. Specifically when you involve a diverse group. But when an organisation sets up idea management one should realise that resources should be made available to coordinate the process. In a previous blogpost “Implementing Idea Management” we concluded that implementing effective idea management is about asking the right people the right questions. A significant amount of time should be spent getting the questions right. While supplying feedback to idea generators can improve the quality of a specific idea and motivates them to keep submitting ideas that constantly increase in quality. This feedback and motivation is part of community management, a crucial element within idea management.

An idea challenge normally runs for a specific amount of time (compared to open ended idea management) and is focussed around a specific subject.

Crowd-sourced design process in the context of idea management
Because of our experience at Innovation Factory with idea challenges we could see the potential upfront to leverage a community like Crowdspring where the diverse background of its members contributes to a very creative logo. I find it really interesting to see that the above mentioned crowd-sourced design process has a lot of similarities with an idea challenge:

1. Clear question. It is very important to state a well thought out briefing as this gives direction. At an idea challenge the way you formulate your question is identically crucial. Also a set timing of two weeks helps the “sense of urgency” of contributors to submit a design quickly rather than postponing it. Idea challenges also run best for a set time.
2. Good feedback. From our experience with idea challenges we know that it is absolutely vital to give constructive and fast feedback. As a result you get more and higher quality contributions.
3. Scout the community for input. Part of the community management activities we perform at idea challenges consists of looking through member profiles to see if their experience and knowledge matches a specific idea. We then contact those people to ask if they can contribute to the idea. This proactive moderation activity was exactly what we did at the Crowdspring design contest as well by searching for designers that we thought could make a good contribution.
4. Diversity boosts creativity. In general diversity helps to boost creativity. In that respect internet tools help to lower the barrier significantly to attract a broad public. This holds both for idea management software but also for the Crowdspring website.
5. Self-regulation within the community. The self-regulation we saw at the logo design process, also happens in another form at idea challenges. People place corrective comments on ‘bad’ ideas and the community also acts as a first filter on which ideas are good and which are not. This is done by letting people vote ideas up or down and the commenting.

In the end it means that you definitely need to make time available to coordinate the whole process. It takes a lot of time to support the community in the right way, but you will probably be positively surprised by the good results you will get with open innovation.