A Stanford researcher studied 20,000 organizations and found managers waste innovation by ignoring ideas from outside the firm. The trick: ask a concrete question, share your own idea first to spark participation, then focus on the few surprising submissions that actually matter instead of chasing volume.
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Too many managers fail to innovate because they don't tap into the power of the crowd to come up with new ideas. I have studied 20,000 organizations who have crowdsourced ideas. Today, I'm at the Stanford football stadium to discuss why you should leverage into the potential of crowdsourcing and how to do so effectively. Ideas do not solely originate in the organization. It is not a sign of weakness to go beyond the boundaries of your organization and to gather ideas from the outside. It is a strategic move to generate new ideas and to gain a fresh perspective. You may think of the crowd just as an amalgam of nameless contributors, but to do so would be a mistake. You want to think of the crowd as being composed of individuals with individual desires and experiences. Now you have seen why crowdsourcing can help your organization. But how do you get started? Imagine I ask the crowd, how would you improve the Stanford football stadium? One way to get things going is by sharing your own idea. To do crowdsourcing well, you want to focus on value, not volume. All you need is a few ideas that make a real difference for the organization. And keep in mind, you want to pay attention to the strangest and most surprising ideas. The entire purpose of crowdsourcing is trying to gain a fresh, new perspective. Imagine each of these dots is an idea from the crowd. You have 100 ideas, 10 of those are valuable to your organization. Now imagine you increase the number of ideas by a factor of 10, but now Oh, the valuable ideas get easily overlooked. Rather than doing a cattle call to gather the largest crowd possible, you're better off in focusing on a small range of diverse ideas. To tap into the power of the crowd allows you to generate new ideas and to gain a fresh perspective. Just remember: signal that you're open, Pay attention to your users and take the time to evaluate the strangest ideas.
