Co-creating Ideas

This triangular relationship is just as important when it comes to co-creating ideas as part of a well thought through innovation process. This helps to avoid Arthur C. Clarke’s two dangers when trying to see into the future – the “Failure of Nerve and Failure of Imagination”.

“The Failure of Imagination occurs by failing to discover vital facts or not even admitting to the possibility of their existence and the Failure of Nerve happens when with all the relevant facts at our disposal we fail to see their inescapable conclusion because they were not marshaled correctly.” So when it comes to using co-creation for innovation purposes there are some important principles that need to be followed. Here are just three of them.

“Bottom up is not enough. Bottom-up processes are great but in order to be effective they need to be complemented by solid strategic direction and expertise. Successful innovations emerge at the intersection of three, sometimes very different, agendas: the consumer and his needs, the brand and its strategy (vision, strategy, commercial viability), the expert and his vision (market knowledge and expertise, market trends).

Allow group thinking as well as individual thinking. Group thinking is generative and provides elements of validation, but it is also skewed towards social conformity. On the other hand, individual thinking provides a more independent idea generation process but it’s not generative. The best ideas often come from building on each other’s contribution rather than coming up with the final solution in one go. A balanced innovation process needs to ensure both the dynamics are well represented.

Open up. Allow ideas to come from anywhere and allow consumers to take you to places you wouldn’t expect to be taken to. Opening up helps keep the Failure of Imagination at bay by enabling contributions by non-experts or non-professional users. This has been made much easier by consumers’ increasing desire to be listened to and involved more directly in what a brand does and says.”

From “Designing Relevance: How Open and Agile Research Methodologies can Help Complex Organizations Respond to Change and Stay Relevant” A Nokia & Face Innovation Case Study

More on Nokia & Face Project Relevance here http://www.facegroup.com/casestudies/nokia-designing-relevance

Co-creation is about collaboration. It’s about working together to solve problems, uniting a range of perspectives and approaches to an issue. Very often this collaboration involves consumers working directly with professionals from inside and outside a client organisation, to define and create a range of outputs, from strategy to communications, from products to experiences.

Co-creation can help break the yo-yo effect of research and development, where clients go back and forward between creative agencies, research agencies and their audience. By working with your consumers, rather than directing stuff at them in the hope that it will stick, clients get a real sense of what works and what doesn’t as the ideation takes place. Ideas emerge, develop, are refined and validated in collaboration with your audience, in real time. No need to wait around for endless tests.

Why co-create?
Much of the growth of interest in co-creation as an approach and philosophy comes against a backdrop of dramatic changes in the communications landscape in recent years. The evolution of the internet has had an enormous impact on the way that businesses interact with their audiences, and vice versa. It is near-impossible to underestimate the extent to which social media has empowered consumers to voice their opinions, create and distribute their own content, and, as active stakeholders in the brands they consume, to set a new agenda for producer-consumer relationships, and in many ways the advent of co-creation is a corollary of these developments.

How?
There are, of course, different approaches to co-creation. The heart of the co-creation process we have adopted is typically a face-to-face workshop, but the ideal model involves a multi-staged approach to insight generation/opportunity shaping, ideation, validation and refinement. We often talk about reversing the research funnel, starting by consulting the crowd, moving on to work with defined online communities, then collaborating with an intimate group of co-creators.

Crowdsouring is a buzzword that has been knocking around for a while now. There is a lot of thought, theory and ongoing conversation about it, and we’re starting to see brands begin to use it in various different formats.

But how does it work in the research & innovation world?

‘Journey To The Centre Of The Crowd… And Back Again’ explores crowdsourcing from it’s definition and gives hints, tips and strategy advice on how you can implement crowsourcing for innovation.

]]> 1 http://www.facegroup.com/how-researchers-and-planners-should-harness-the-crowd.html http://www.facegroup.com/how-researchers-and-planners-should-harness-the-crowd.html#comments Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:05:17 +0000 Job http://www.facegroup.com/?p=3877

Listen to the crowd, but do not lose control!

Let’s be clear I don’t believe the crowd (without being very selective 
about your crowd) alone can give you fully formed insights, npd ideas 
and creative executions. I do believe however that the crowd and the 
web should play an instrumental role in research, planning and 
innovation. So here are 3 ways that the crowd should be used to help 
you crack these types of briefs:

Listen to the crowd

The web hosts conversations on pretty much every subject a researcher 
or planner could ever want to know about. In fact it is the biggest 
research resource we have access to so start using it. There are a 
number of tools including our own pulsar social media monitoring and 
analysis platform that allow us to listen to the crowd. When you start 
listening you will quickly find consumer problems that need solving, 
what brands are hot and not and lots of opportunities to engage with 
Pro-am consumers. Listening in real time to what consumers are 
discussing is addictive and very powerful if it feeds into an adaptive 
planning process.

Ask the crowd

Crowdsourcing is best used in the early stages of a project. Again 
there are lots of platforms you can use – we have developed our own 
platform that we are currently using for www.cocreatelondon.com. The 
process starts by giving consumers a clear question or challenge to 
respond to. What you will get back is a diverse mass of topline ideas, 
thoughts and some fully rounded responses. The role of the planner/
researcher with the help of clever filtering software is to look at 
the patterns from this data. What lays behind the ideas – in short what 
are the insights. Insights that can be used by planners to build 
platforms for innovation or communication.

Crowd wisdom

By opening up ideas in a crowdsourcing community for comment and 
rating you can see clearly user-generated clusters. This engagement 
amongst the community can highlight the strong ideas or themes; but 
just as importantly it can start the process of collaboration and 
co-creation to make ideas better and more appealing.

We thought we would let you know what’s been going on over at CoCreateLondon.com, starting with the Top 10 ideas on the site so far as voted for by Co-Create London users.

1) Free Wi-Fi hotspots in public spaces across town – 127 votes
Free WiFi access seems to be something that Londoners want to see in the city. However there has been some backlash to this with other users asking – how would WiFi make London a better place?

2) Open library-style book kiosks/ book swap system in Tube stations so Londoners are never without reading material on the underground! – 63 votes
Bringing some culture & entertainment to the transport system is something that has been a running theme on the site. This idea has been the pick of the bunch with a strong backing from Co-Create London users.

3) Oyster Card becomes Oyster London card – pay for anything in London up to the value of 20GBP – 58 votes
A few users have been quick to say that this idea has already been explored by TFL but didn’t go ahead due to financial regulation complications. However, making it only for small payments adds in a new angle and would encourage spending.

Could it be used for other purchases beside travel?

4) Tube Tunnels as giant immersive flipbooks. We all travel miles & miles underground everyday through black tunnels. The Tube carriages have all got amazing windows to look outside of the train at… well, nothing. Wouldn’t it be nice if the walls of the tunnels were covered in series of pictures that vary gradually from one to the next, so that when the trains goes through the tunnel they get animated? – 56 votes
A new model for artists, creative types, brands and advertisers to get involved with. Would brighten up millions of Londoners journey to work but is it feasible?

5) Simply by putting air conditioning on the tubes would improve life in London during the Summer 100% – 56 votes
Boris has introduced air conditioning on the circle line and, as some Co-Creators have noted, there have been cut backs on energy use in stations to reduce heat but is it even possible for there to be a totally cool tube?

6) Annual Open Labs Day…Similar to Open House Weekend, but celebrates our city’s vast and under-appreciated science culture. The public get to question real scientists in working labs, and explore London’s scientific history (Darwin, Newton, Hooke, Faraday, Franklin, Jenner, Davy, Maxwell…) through open days at places like the Royal Society, Royal Institution etc. – 54 Votes
Exposing and helping the public understand the great scientific significance and heritage London has is a great idea! Could be amazing with the right marketing behind it, but will it get backing from Boris?

Boris has unveiled air-conditioned tubes on the circle line but can he do this for the whole of the tube system??

7) A swimming lane system on Oxford Street, people who want to walk slowly and browse you walk on the inside of the pavement (nearest the shops), people who have got to go places and are in a hurry walk on the outside (nearest the road). This would stop all the pushing, shoving, barging, dodging, frustration, pain etc that walking on Oxford Street causes!! – 49 votes
The human congestion on Oxford Street causes frustration for thousands. The new crossing at Oxford Circus has been a success so why not go one step further and create a manageable, easy and beneficial system for the rest of the street?

8 ) Turn Empty Shops in to spaces for performance, places to learn a new skill and mini-markets for creative local residents to sell their wares. – 46 votes
It is no secret that there are lots of empty retail spaces in London, especially after the recession. Why not do something positive with this free space? Giving it back to the community could help regenerate areas and encourage potential buyers.

9) Instead of the Oyster machines making the same beeping noise when you go through, each one has a different musical note, such as a piano key.  – 45 votes
Would a series of these small, fun and quirky ideas cheer up commuters and make travelling in the city more fun? The users on the Co-Create London site seem to think so!

Outdoor dancing, big in China, could it be introduced in London???

10) Encourage more frequent outdoor dancing – 412votes
China and Japan have been doing it for years, it is hard to imagine Londoners getting involved though. Would be amazing if the right scheme was set up!

Throughout this week we will be running through some of our favourite ideas and releasing more information about the journey Co-Create London is about to go on!

What Would You Do To Make London A Better Place?

At Face we don’t like standing still; partly because we are always looking to improve and do things better, and partly because as the world changes we need to change with it. 2010 will be no different, and we are bursting with new ideas for products, communities & projects. Here are our predictions about the research & innovation business in 2010, and a sneak preview of some of the things Face will be up to.

1. 2010 the year when research goes truly mobile as smart phones become commonplace and research on the go starts to catch up

Face will be developing a smart phone application that allows us to conduct research more effectively on the go and in real time

2. The year when the research industry embraces & empowers consumers as researchers, to truly reach the parts that researchers cannot reach – peer2peer research shows what the industry looks like turned inside out.

Through our communities Headbox & Mindbubble we are training consumers to act as researchers within their own peer groups going undercover and asking the questions we didn’t even know we needed to ask.

3. The year when Tech Research & Innovation begins to learn from FMCG research in terms of innovation and product development. Why? Because the consumer is now the subject & not the object of technology.

Face is launching our own tech community in 2010, aimed at engaging tech leaders in insight and innovation work

4. The year that social media & the web as a source of insight is finally taken seriously. Everyone wakes up to the fact that the greatest source of data is around us all the time – it’s just a case of harnessing it. No more excuses.

Face launches 2 new real time research products – Pulsar Snapshot & Pulsar Tracker – designed to monitor and analyse conversations and interactions around brands & categories in real time.

5. Co-creation & communities go east – increased confidence in the methodologies takes them firmly out of the west and into Eastern Europe, Russia, Asia & South Pacific

Face is launching community platforms & co-creation projects in India & Australia, building on existing platforms in China, Russia, Thailand, Philippines & Indonesia.

6. Death by Powerpoint becomes death of Powerpoint, slowly, slowly. One day soon. We won’t be crying.

Face will be emphasizing visual clarity & simplicity in terms of outputs and making more and more of our debriefs / output material available online as an ongoing treasure trove for clients

7. The year that the industry embraces communities in their ongoing insight, innovation & planning cycles, enabling them to work in the real world as their brands become as social as the people consuming them are!

Face has developed an adaptive brand planning process that helps Insight, Planners & Marketing people to keep their brand planning dynamic, organic and always on!

8. The year of the rebirth of insight. Researchers realise that processes like Co-Creation, Communities & Crowd-sourcing are not just there to play with, but are serious methods of getting better result, especially in the day in day out job of getting clients closer to their customers.

Face is doubling the size of its insight teams and putting actionable insight at the heart of everything we do

So, 2010, some big challenges & quite a journey ahead but a truly exciting time for us and the industry as a whole. Look forward to going on that journey with you.

The guys over at http://www.openbusiness.cc are running a competition that allows you to nominate your top open companies/organizations/platforms in the world. The Open 100 celebrates the power of openness and mass collaboration. The competition was born out of the UK’s National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA) search for the world’s top 100 open innovation organizations. Now it is being opened up to you to find who the world’s best open innovators really are. You can nominate those companies you think are the best deserving to appear on the list of the best and most interesting open businesses at http://www.openbusiness.cc/category/directory/.

You might wonder what we actually mean what we mean by open organizations? While there is no clear-cut definition of ‘openness’ there is undeniably a trend to democratize and de-centralize previously closed business processes as the lines between consumers and producers blur. Increasingly companies are opening up their innovation and production processes. Some are formed from the start around communities as with Face, while others are opening up their intellectual property to share with others. This promises better, faster and more efficient innovation.

Lego, hoping to be part of The Open 100

Roland Harwood of NESTA responded to the idea that open innovation is bandied around as a phrase too much, suggesting that the techniques will eventually just drop the word ‘open’ as it becomes more the norm. “It’s over-hyped and has been used and misused but the trends that underpin it are only going to increase. Open innovation is being prioritized at a senior level in organizations. Leaders like its promise of creating value quicker, cheaper, faster,” said Harwood to Businessweek. “But it’s the middle managers and heads of departments who have the responsibility for implementing this. They’re struggling for the right processes and business models and they don’t know where to start. That’s where the gap is. The strategic argument has been won; now it’s a pragmatic challenge.” The practice is always so much more difficult than the theory.

A month into the competition and there are a varied mixture of organizations and platforms nominated. Major telecommunications companies like BT, Nokia and Orange are nominated for their open innovation approach. Collaboratively made films like Faintheart,and El Cosmonauta as well as a Creative Commons based film production company are also nominated. Household name web startups like Firefox, Twitter, Flickr, Google, Ebay and Facebook have been put forward as well as the smaller but equally important web services that focus on the environment like Akvo and Pachube.

International megabrands such as Lego, Virgin Atlantic, Tesco, IBM and Dell are also in the running with open innovation and openhardware communitites like Harkopen and Openp2pdesign.org. There are also 3 nominations for the band Nine Inch Nails for their pioneering transparent and co-created approach (nomination 1, 2, 3).

In 2009 Nine Inch Nails released their album, The Slip, as a free download

Nominated companies for ‘The Open 100’ can fall into the following categories:

Open Innovation│ Crowdsourcing │ Co-creation │ Open Source Software │Open Hardware│ Open Business (includes web 2.0)

And they will need to do some of the following…

∟ innovate products or services through communities

∟ share information for free using alternative ‘open copyright models’

∟ give substantial parts of a product or service away for free

∟ operate organizationally like open source software production, but translate the model to services

∟ lowering the costs of market entry by providing tools or services, that ‘open’ up traditional business boundaries

Public nomination will close on the 12th of February and the panel of judges will then choose the winner from each category. The panel of judges includes: Vic Keegan (technology correspondent Guardian), Marc Surman (director Mozilla Foundation), Roland Harwood (director Open Innovation at NESTA), David Simoes-Brown (head of Corporate Open Innovation at NESTA) and Andrew Gaule (found of the H-I Network and leader of the Network for Innovation and Strategic Growth). The winners will be announced on the 24^th of February at the ‘Open 4 Business’ conference at NESTA and at http://www.openbusiness.cc/. The winners will have the privilege of being published through NESTA and The Guardian Open Platform in the ultimate collection of open organizations; ‘The Open100’. Help celebrate the benefits of openness by nominating your favourite organizations or platforms at:

http://www.openbusiness.cc/category/directory/

Follow The Open 100 on Twitter at:

http://twitter.com/TheOpen100

Check out Face’s entry to The Open 100:

http://www.openbusiness.cc/2010/01/21/face/

It is always nice to see someone from the advertising world stepping out and talking about involving consumers in their processes. It is even nicer when they work in the same building as us! Owen Lee, Founder & Creative Chairman of Farm (our office mates), had a letter published in the latest edition of Campaign Magazine titled ‘We’re Still Not Taking Consumers Seriously Enough’.

Owen stresses the point that agencies & brands need to listen to, and collaborate with their audience as today’s empowered consumers ‘have the power to make or break brands in an instance’. He goes on to say that in today’s 24/7 online world there is a need to make big changes and ‘move away from campaign bursts’ exchanging them for ‘a continuous engagement model’.

You can read Owen’s letter in full below… Click on the image to enlarge!

]]> 1 http://www.facegroup.com/do-brands-really-need-agencies.html http://www.facegroup.com/do-brands-really-need-agencies.html#comments Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:42:01 +0000 Francesco http://www.facegroup.com/?p=3022 Do Brands Need Agencies? | Face Forum, Nov 09

Following on from the success of our Web 2.0 Women forum earlier this year we thought it was about time we opened up another hot topic for debate. The last Face Forum revolved around the key question ‘Do Brands Need Agencies?’ On the 18th of November we have been joined by friends, experts and clients at the Groucho club to discuss what it takes to stay relevant and true to your consumers, how to engage the crowds in research innovation and planning and what are some of the tech trends for 2010 and beyond. Here’s a quick summary:

Relevance
The real-time social web has changed the way we communicate giving us the tools to get and share information at a pace we have not experienced before. This has made the web the richest insight field we have ever had. How can you harness the power of the world wide wave for research, brand planning and brand engagement? What are real-time research and adaptive brand planning? And how can they help your brand stay relevant?

Crowds
Barely a day goes by without a website, campaign or competition cropping up, promising to harness the collective wisdom of crowds for the benefit of brands. Peperami even ditched Lowe to ask the crowds. But is bottom-up really enough? When did crowdsourcing cease to be a means to an end and become an end in itself? Join us to discuss a hybrid model where crowd-sourcing and co-creation are used as complementary methodologies.

Trends
We asked 3000 19 to 25 years old young adults about their consumption habits, media and tech diet. The Forum will be the place where we present our latest Techtribe report, uncovering youth trends that will soon start migrating to other audiences

It was a great night! Here’s the presentation that kick-started the discussion, join in and tell us what you think

Following my blog Co-Creation is Driving Change in the Way We Work here are my thoughts on how co-creation is creating a new breed of agency where the disciplines of research, innovation, social media and advertising/communications are coming together in a more seamless way under one roof.

Co-creation and its underlying philosophy whereby consumers want to have things done with them rather than at them will ultimately usher in a new breed of agency. There are several reasons for this:-

1) Consumers have replaced trust in advertising with trust in individuals: in particular, friends, family, and colleagues. Turning to communities and away from mass media, consumers are increasingly making traditional advertising more irrelevant. They have learned to block the ads they don’t want, and gate-keeping is becoming more sophisticated and widespread: according to Forrester Research DVR ownership in North America, which features ad-skipping, will grow from 19% of households in 2006 to 55% in 2011. More than half of UK consumers using the Internet at home utilize spam and popup blockers to filter unwanted messages from their online experiences, and countries like the Netherlands, France, and Germany are not far behind.

2) Consumers want to be more involved with the brands and products they consume: this applies also to the way they are communicated to them through advertising. Doritos is the most famous example in the UK whereby consumers were invited via a competition to create the next TV campaign. More recently Unilever’s Peperami have dropped Lowe to Crowdsource their next ad campaign with consumers. Noam Buchalter marketing manager at Peperami says: “We believe Peperami is a brand that deserves radical creative solutions and are confident taking our brief out to thousands rather than a small team of “creatives” will provide us with the best possible idea and take our advertising to the next level.”

3) Consumers are showing in increasing numbers that they prefer pull to push: almost all consumers own a PC and mobile phone, and they spend almost half of their media time with interactive channels. Use of RSS and podcasts has increased to 10% and 14%, respectively, from virtually nothing in 2003. Mark Earls author of Herd, says that it is no longer about what your brand does to the consumer but what consumers are doing to and with your brand. Putting it another way, James Murdoch in his Marketing Society Annual Lecture said ‘Ubiquitous connectivity means fundamentally that the individual becomes the agent of everything…we’ve learnt through experience what difference the new empowered world means for our relationship with customers. This is not a question of scale. It is a different way of existing’.

4) Different ways of existing means there is more fragmentation: which in turn is driving more complexity. The number of media channels available to marketers, agencies, and consumers has exploded. Proliferation of choice offers marketers new opportunities, such as social networks, mobile, and branded entertainment. Social media, in which consumers become publishers and media outlets drives media buyers crazy; there are more than 59 million videos in YouTube today, and they can’t cut deals with every blogger.

5) A new marketing funnel is required. The current one which sits at the heart of most current advertising and media buying agencies is out of date. “Integrated” or “360” marketing is still an excuse to sell campaign ideas as brand ideas so that they can produce a TV commercial and shoe horn other channels in afterwards. Consumers need to be at the heart of a new marketing model so that we can move away from channel marketing to “continuous brand engagement” marketing.

6) A new definition of “mass media” is emerging: More and more consumers are creating their own content and are coming together to form communities around it. Personal profiles on sites like Myspace, Bebo and Facebook don’t simply state vital statistics, they allow marketers access to preferences, allegiances, recommendations and conversations they could not have dreamed of even five years ago. And there are communities for every niche, so the same data richness can be experienced for every specific brand, sector or topic. It is always up to date being spontaneously added to by consumers. The new mass media is made up of a collection of communities. As more consumers become involved in social media, these platforms will grow and eclipse today’s mainstream media.

7) Traditional advertising can’t deliver a captive audience in this new consumer landscape: Nearly a quarter of marketers polled by Ipsos Mori for the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s latest Marketing Trends survey said advertising, excluding online, gave the worst return on investment. Almost a quarter of marketers rated CRM as the best, with PR activities coming in second highest in terms of ROI.

In the New Breed of Agency:

Consumers will be treated in a fundamentally different way: They will be given more responsibility and will be more involved throughout the brand marketing process. Co-creating with consumers as direct and active equals to deliver a range of marketing outputs will be part of its core philosophy.

Consumer communities will reign: The focus on the 30 second TV spot will give way to the content and conversations that are being generated by consumers and between consumers around the brand. This will in turn produce different segmentation models where brands see consumers not just as potential customers who want to buy something from them but as people who want to have a relationship with them.

New social media tools will help brands to be on 24/7: this is part of what we call at Face “the socialisation of brands” where campaign and channel marketing gives way to “continuous brand engagement marketing”. The environment the brand lives and breathes in is always on and is always changing so brands need to be listening to and observing their consumers not just in communities but also on the web as well as involving them on a continuous basis in everything they do.

Engaging and managing brand fan bases will be key: Developing creative ways for engaging and managing fan bases will be critical to the New Breed proposition. As Marmite and Peperami have shown involving consumers through co-creation and crowdsourcing respectively in what a brand says and does is a great way of driving brand engagement with important fan bases.

The arrival of research 3.0: new social media tools and web 2.0 are helping brands to research consumers in more exciting and different ways through mass collaboration and intimate co-creation. Combined with new ways of accumulating robust qualitative data which we can make sense of from the web, then research has an exciting future ahead of it. It will herald a new era – Research 3.0.

Ideas can come from anywhere: a new model which combines the creativity of experts with the creativity of consumers so that more ideas of better quality can be produced is on its way. In the New Breed Agency, experts have an even bigger role to play than ever before. The researchers, the designers, the marketers, the copywriters, the art directors, the account men, the planners will become facilitators, analysts, curators, editors, creative directors and publishers. Their role is critical to ensuring that the overall creative output is polished and of an extremely high standard.

A mix of old and new: the new breed of agency will exist both in a virtual capacity and the real world – consumers will not only feel comfortable hanging out in the agency as part of continuous co-creation programmes but their content will also be streamed live onto TV screens. The processes and methodologies of this new agency will also reflect a combination of the old and new. This will be done not just for the sake of it but because it delivers better ROI.

Talent resides in and outside the company: the new breed of agency will be less worried with employing everybody they work with. It recognises that the best talent can come from both inside and outside the company. This will also be reflected in more collaborative and flexible working practices.