How To Convert Your Idea Into Collective Innovation

Have an idea and are feeling confused what next!! Then the good news is that those days are gone when you needed huge team and big reservoir of resources . Liz Gerber (Associate Professor of Design, the Faculty Founder of Design for America, at Northwestern University) in her article on Huffpost says that with the rise of social media and internet, innovators don’t need to look for full time partners or support from big companies, they can harness the huge reservoir of support online. She calls this Collective innovation– “An innovation process that supports the discovery, evaluation, and implementation of new ideas OUTSIDE of companies by tapping critical resources from online networks at each stage of the process.”

A case to show the power of collective innovation is of two girls Hannah and Aaron who had an innovative idea for educating and comforting children with type 1 diabetes. They created an interactive teddy bear specially designed for these children.  Children have to take care of this interactive bear by feeding him foods, giving him insulin, and checking his blood glucose levels. As children keep Jerry healthy, they unlock stories of the bear’s epic adventures.

Liz Gerber share, “Hannah and Aaron conceived of the idea while talking with doctors and families they knew. But they didn’t stop there, they engaged over 350 educators, health professionals, health technicians through weakly connected social networks and online diabetes forums. Together, they could identify, generate, deliberate, and select concepts.

When trying to figure out how to build Jerry, Aaron and Hannah turned to thousands of instructional videos on platforms such as YouTube and Kahn Academy to develop the specialized mechatronics skills necessary to build Jerry; they learned by example, studying related products posted on crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter, to learn about manufacturing processes and costs. And could hire people to build the circuit boards through paid task markets, such as Upwork. Without the formal access to expertise in development and manufacturing a company could provide, Aaron and Hannah could access the necessary expertise at this stage. Hannah and Aaron ordered parts online and manufactured product in their living room. They marketed the product and fulfilled orders on demand through crowdfunding platforms.”

And result, they could achieve 75% market penetration with pediatric endocrinologists without actually working in or with any big toy brand or medical brand. That is the power of collective Innovation.

Collective innovation may not be a very good idea where hard core technical expertise is needed or where there are many regulations in place but for developing consumer related products or services this is definitely a front runner because when you involve so many people with different expertise in the process you increase your chances of success as for every different idea you can choose the best fit from that source.

If you have an idea but feel you do not have the necessary resources to develop it then Collective innovation is definitely something you should find more about. You can read the whole article at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/collective-innovation-using-the-internet-to-scale_us_59680957e4b06a2c8edb4559

Stay inspired, because the Unexpected begins with U 🙂