Been thinking about open innovation lately.
Not necessarily about tech platforms, rights management, and so on.
But rather on the participant’s experience.

  • Is there a challenge submitted by a sponsoring organization?
  • Or does the effort provide a collective benefit to participants?
  • How long does it take new users to orient themselves with the environment/interface and get to participate?
  • Are idea submissions completely crafted by the individual, then submitted for review?
  • Or are they draft-submitted to a group, built upon, and submitted as a concept for further review?
  • What are the phases? (Ex: ideation, filtering, fit analysis, iterative review)
  • Online: If only one project is open at a time, which global navigation options are essential to have in the active experience state?
  • To what degree is the general public invited to participate?
  • If large, what is their incentive(s) to participate?
  • Who are the participating stakeholders?
  • What’s the ratio of participating internal to external stakeholders?
  • Is there a pre-defined total project time?
  • Or do phases’ term lengths vary with activity rates and phase fulfillment needs?
  • Is the process fully online, offline, or a hybrid mix of both?

I think that if we consider open innovation as a valuable way to develop great ideas, then we have to highly take personal and social psychology, economics, and human-computer interaction design factors into the architecture and operation of such a system. Although such platforms are relatively new (technologically speaking), we can’t just license a white-label software platform and tweak it to our liking.

Whatever the goal of the site is, be it voting or sharing ideas, long or short-term engagement, there’s two basic principles I always espouse in interaction design (coming from my sales experience):

  1. Address “What’s in it for ME?” (participant as beneficiary)
  2. Get participants into and out of your interaction process as quickly as possible. Respect their time!

I like to think of these points as absolutely essential for motivating people’s logic and emotion to participate. Each open innovation platform will need to address its operational rules differently based on the context, but neglecting these two points will hinder: adoption, repeated use, happiness, and word of mouth.