We just wrote about the innovator’s dilemma. As if rolling out the strategic business case for our Foresight platform, the Wall Street Journal followed their excerpt from the latest edition of their management guide—“The End of Management”—with a piece on leveraging employee innovation. In large organizations, employees are a crowd with considerable wisdom. And Foresight offers executives a sophisticated tool for innovation management.

J.C. Spender and Bruce Strong suggest “innovation communities” as a solution to harvesting employee innovation. Implementations of Foresight involve participants—often employees—in a market process that functions as an innovation community.

Dr. Spender and Mr. Strong’s ideal innovation communities include seven key characteristics:

• Create the space to innovate.
• Get a broad variety of viewpoints.
• Create a conversation between senior management and participants.
• Participants should be pulled to join, not pushed.
• Tapping unused talent and energy keeps product-development costs low.
• Collateral benefits can be as important as the innovations themselves.
• Measurement is key.

If you’d like to see an example of such an innovation community among our many customer successes, take a look at what Motorola accomplished using Foresight. We’re further expanding this concept through our partnership with Brightidea and their WebStorm interface. If you’re ready to create an innovation community within your organization, so are we.

According to an adapted excerpt from the recently published The Wall Street Journal Essential Guide to Management, The Innovator’s Dilemma is an influential book among several major CEOs. For executives who are concerned that they’ll miss “disruptive innovations that opened up new customers and markets for lower-margin, blockbuster products,” we’ve got a solution: Foresight.

Adding a bit more context from Alan Murray’s piece:

Even the best-managed companies aren’t protected from this destructive clash between whirlwind change and corporate inertia. When I asked members of The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council, a group of chief executives who meet each year to deliberate on issues of public interest, to name the most influential business book they had read, many cited Clayton Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” That book documents how market-leading companies have missed game-changing transformations in industry after industry—computers (mainframes to PCs), telephony (landline to mobile), photography (film to digital), stock markets (floor to online)—not because of “bad” management, but because they followed the dictates of “good” management. They listened closely to their customers. They carefully studied market trends. They allocated capital to the innovations that promised the largest returns. And in the process, they missed disruptive innovations that opened up new customers and markets for lower-margin, blockbuster products.

Information is being generated at ever increasing speeds. Executives hoping to draw lessons from those profiled by Christensen would do well to realize that thought leadership is all around them. Our Foresight platform facilitates innovation management by extracting collective thought leadership from throughout (and, if the business case requires it, beyond) the corporation.

More Murray:

Information gathering also needs to be broader and more inclusive. Former Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley’s demand that the company cull product ideas from outside the company, rather than developing them all from within, was a step in this direction. (It even has a website for submitting ideas.) The new model will have to go further. New mechanisms will have to be created for harnessing the “wisdom of crowds.” Feedback loops will need to be built that allow products and services to constantly evolve in response to new information. Change, innovation, adaptability, all have to become orders of the day.

We have the “new mechanism.” For us, it’s not new. It’s a stable, mature platform in its sixth major release with several examples of customer success to show for it.

We’re working hard to ensure that executives are equipped and thereby empowered to solve enterprise problems in important domains:

• forecasting, where Foresight offers strong guidance capabilities
• brand identity and brand development
• innovative disruptions

Over the coming months, we’ll be exploring ways that today’s executives can demonstrate collective thought leadership. If you need a solution to the innovator’s dilemma, give us a call.

We recently created a partnership with Brightidea, the global leader in on-demand innovation management, to integrate WebStorm as a social front end to the Foresight platform. In combination with Brightidea’s Switchboard for idea and investment evaluation, this partnership offers a complete end-to-end crowdsourcing solution.

As organizations move through later phases of the innovation process, costs and risks increase. Our Foresight platform can help mitigate risks in these later innovation phases and enable your crowd to efficiently and quickly prioritize the best investments that will yield the highest return for your company. In a later stage of Brightidea’s crowdsourcing solution, the ability to accelerate innovation provides a key competitive advantage.

We’re excited about having a successful case study of our open API for Foresight, and we’re also excited about partnering with an industry leader to be able to offer a comprehensive solution to an important customer need in an increasingly complex world, where successfully managing ideas is more important than ever. If you’re as excited as we are, we hope you’ll want to know more.