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.