Our Approach: Five Core Practices
Minimally committed “knowledge baton passers.”
A crowd responding to an innovation challenge question offers less than two posts per participant, with virtually no dialogue, and very little time for social support. They do not “collaborate” in a traditional sense. Rather, such crowds collaborate by passing bits of knowledge as short batons specially conceived to inspire, not simply inform others.
Sharing a variety of knowledge types matters more than any specific knowledge shared.
Research has proven that no single specific type of knowledge— including prior ideas—affected whether an innovative idea was posted. What mattered was the variety of the knowledge types. In other words, more ideas do not breed better solutions. Rather, it is the variety of types of knowledge that matters.
Amplifying Creative Associations
Just mimicking others’ ideas or knowledge does not make stakeholders more likely to innovate. Instead, participants use the creative associations shared by others as jumping off points, to think about other associations they might have in their own memory about the problem. This process actually jump-starts a positive feedback loop providing more fodder for creative discovery.
Reconstructing Problem-Associated Needs to Spark Creative Associations
The community cannot simply accept existing needs or solutions offered by others if the crowd wants to collectively produce innovative solutions. If they simply accepted others’ professed needs, the best the crowd could do would be to treat the needs as requirements and generate a solution that is more expansive or inclusive only of those needs. Specifically, the new solutions suggested by the crowd would merely be a refinement and broadened version of initially proposed solutions, with little collective co-generation.
Instead, Collective Production of innovation requires that the crowd reformulates the initial needs to spark others to express their creative associations. The crowd reformulates others’ initial professed needs—either by offering personalized and concrete examples of the need in a different context to create an analogy for others to build upon, or to abstract the initial need to apply to societal issues and corresponding human action. This, in turn, inspires others in the crowd to strive to achieve solutions that address new, more value-based goals than simply meeting professed requirements.
Enacting self-selected innovation-enabling roles
We find that the crowd is composed of more than ideators. Rather, in more innovation-producing crowds, individuals perform a range of innovation-enabling roles other than ideation. Some individuals engage in: need elicitation, need reconstruction, and creative associations. Another set of individuals may provide basic knowledge facts about the problem while another subset generates entirely new solutions specifically by using (integrating or reshaping) the knowledge provided by others. Ultimately, the crowd gives everyone a voice about the problem, in their own preferred way of sharing that voice.