Crowd-sourcing the Brand Identity itself

Crowd sourcing has been a viable option with a philosophy of ‘a million heads are better than few’, ‘the expertise lies outside of the organization also’, ‘ time taken to design & create products can be reduced ‘

Mostly, organizations have created platforms and avenues where their customers or general public can engage with the organization and give product ideas, help in co-product creation and become part of customer-networks. Some examples of such crowd-sourcing platforms & initiatives are:

• Fiat Mio - create a car
• Open Innovation Sara Lee - open innovation portal of Sara Lee
• P&G Open Innovation Challenge - external idea sourcing in Britain
• Kraft - innovate with Kraft
• Dell IdeaStorm - external idea sourcing
• Vocalpoint - P&G’s network for women
• My Startbucks Idea - shaping the future of Starbucks

Recently, one organization pushed the envelope of crowd sourcing by soliciting ideas & concepts for it’s band identity (logo) from the public. Happiest Minds, a young IT Services start-up, opened up the contest by asking people to submit logo for it’s business. The brief was that the logo should depict the Happiest Minds philosophy, vision, & essence of Happiest People leading to Happiest Customers.

As part of the crowd sourcing contest,  nearly 1400 entries were received and out of these 150 were shortlisted and again, crowd sourcing was done to short list these 150 entries to 25 entries. The public was asked to vote for the design they felt most accurately captured the vision of Happiest Minds. These 25 entries were then evaluated by a jury and 5 were shortlisted for final round.

The logo,  created by Jemin Shingala, was selected as the winner and best reflected Happiest Mind’s business philosophy. The logo was was modified by Shristi School of Design and was unveiled on the day of the launch of the Happiest Mind’s.

No wonder, this experiment proves that in today’s socially connected world, crowd sourcing can be a viable option to get tangible & concrete output — in any possible area. The only challenge  is in being bold and open to make innovative uses of crowd sourcing.

Read the article here for more details:
http://www.happiestminds.com/press-releases/happiest-minds-announces-winner-of-its-logo-contest
http://businessworldindia.com/bw/2011_05_10_Happiest_Minds_Launches_Logo_Design_Contest.html
http://altnews.asia/content/2011/06/29/happiest-minds-logo-contest-receives-over-1000-entries

Search Google for this crowd sourcing experiment: http://www.google.co.in/search?q=happiest+minds+logo+contest

Yes, slowly but surely, the machines are making the decisions for us…

Just like we can’t imagine a life without cellphones or internet; we can’t imagine an Internet without Google. Saying that Google is our personal window, a personal assistant to the information out there on the Internet would be an understatement. And we feel extremely ecstatic when we get the results we want to see on the first page of the Google search results. We love Google for doing all the hard work for us and showing us what we want to see…

Did you ever imagine that somewhere in this journey, Google has become more & more personalized for you and your Google & the Google of your best friend may be a lot different? Do you realize that slowly but surely, Google is taking over the gatekeeper role of what you see on the internet? Yes, even without you having a goggle/gmail account, even if you’re logged out, there are potentially 57 signals that Google might consider – location, browser, language, history, etc — which it uses to personally tailor your query results. Great, isn’t it? What more could users ask for.. You search for shopping your favorite DVD and the stores listed are near to your area, in your language…

There is an issue here and maybe we don’t realize it. All this ‘personalization’ is hard to observe, is kind of invisible to us and that’s why we don’t notice it. When was the last time you tried to check if your search results are different from anyone else’s? Google is not exactly forthcoming in how it does the personalization for us & what it means. So, this leads us to a scenario where we will see things on the internet that Google thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see. Google is acting like a newspaper editor without our permission. Google is controlling what we see and read, and not the way it should be: the other way around. Google is the new gatekeeper of what we see & what information gets to us. We may no longer decide what gets in. And more importantly, we don’t actually see what gets edited out.

Maybe, those sci-fi movies where machines control the world are not far from reality after all..!!!

Read/Listen more on this subject here at a TED Video

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html

What do you want? User adoption or compliance?

I believe that successful KM initiatives & professionals pay a great deal of importance to the change management aspects. If, there is one place where “build it and they will come” doesn’t work, it is KM. After all, users are tuned to a way or working and majority of them would resist any kind of change. It’s a natural reaction and for various reasons a very tricky area to deal with.

Now to counter this tricky area of change management, KM initiatives/professionals rely on approaches which could be counter-productive to what their intentions are. Once such approach, that is commonly adopted is the “top down” mandated approach. On the surface of it, this looks simple, obvious, fast, scalable, logical and the most powerful approach that one can envision. What could be better than the top most management sending out a ‘memo’ asking people to do things a certain way.

I have seen this approach and have observed that this works best when you need ‘compliance’. Areas such as ‘time sheet entry’, ‘filing expenses’ etc are best suited for this approach. Anything transactional can be rolled out on a mass scale using this approach.

The issue arises when you try & roll out KM initiatives with this compliance driven/top-down method. Chances are that more often than not this will not yield the desired results and one can get in a vicious cycle of asking for more ‘top down compliance support’. This can frustrate the hell out of people who are leading these change management initiatives as they can’t fathom why on earth the seemingly obvious method of top down/compliance driven approach is not working.

We all know the results of a top down approach that mandates submission of 2 documents to the knowledge repository every quarter by each employee. On the last week of the quarter you will have a deluge of submissions and most of them would be not worth the bytes contained in them.

On the other hand, KM initiatives/professionals that rely on the adoption approach have greater chances of success. On the surface of it, the adoption approach looks to be an insurmountable obstacle but with patience & a long view of time this can be achieved. Adoption happens when people ‘buy into’ things and not because they are being ‘told to do so’.  Adoption happens because people see that things actually help them, appeal to them on an emotive/cognitive wavelength. Adoption happens when people, who we trust, tell us that it is good, they are using it & it makes sense. Adoption happens ‘through’ people… (We adopted facebook, twitter etc using these principles of adoption.)

The key to adoption approach also lies in finding the right set of people, who you will work with initially. They are going to be your evangelist and believe me they will be like customers who “tell 1 more person, at best, if they satisfied and will tell 100 people if they are not satisfied”.  Starting the process of adoption is slow and takes time. However the growth over time can be exponential and usually has a more stable foundation which is not only dependent on ‘top down’ directives. Adoption approach is akin to trying to move a heavy flywheel… lots of effort & commitment is required initially to even move the flywheel but as the revolutions go by the speed increases and over time the flywheel literally moves on an auto-pilot mode.

I have also observed that a combination of adoption (at a macro level) & top-down (at a micro level) also works in several circumstances. The key is in knowing which one to use when and for what. And that’s comes from experience & losing your hair over the years

Compliance is best achieved through systems & adoption is best achieved through people. So, if you need compliance of initiatives then build systems that monitor themselves for the compliance automatically. However; if you need adoption then be prepared for the long haul & work with people

Indian IT services organizations try out the VC Model for Innovation

Recently there was this news article talking about the Indian IT services organizations try out the VC Model for Innovation:

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/news-by-company/corporate-trends/infosys-mphasis-cognizant-sap-adopt-venture-capital-model/articleshow/8659393.cms

I hope that this time organizations are serious about it and take it to a level beyond ‘lip-service’. While the intent may be there but I really do see challenges as the mindset is still services driven and everything gets measured by ‘# of people’ yardstick. It is very difficult for companies to break away from their successful business models and take risks. The culture which is setup to support the model becomes the nemesis for new ideas and innovation.

It is interesting to note the different paths being talked about by different organizations:

• Infosys talking about a separate subsidiary/company itself. A model that looks good, if right set of people can be brought in to run this – not the same folks from services side. This model has worked for them couple of times before e.g. OnMobile.
• Cognizant – internal VC route. Looks good on paper but runs the risk of going no-where in organizational bureaucracy. However, Cognizant has shown good ‘execution’  skills in past, so they may be able to pull it off
• Wipro is creating a loose community structure of selected folks cutting across verticals to identify areas in which they can innovate. Again, a good model in theory but can requires solid ownership & drive from the very top to make it work.

Let’s see, wait & watch the results of each approach.

Open Source | why & how can I get involved

Not many people are ‘unaware‘ of open source in todays world but still they seem hesitant, confused, or intimidated to enter the open source community and start contributing to open source. Mentioned below are some excellent blog posts that I have read in the recent past around this interesting subject.

Why it is important for organizations to build an open source culture, the competitive advantages of the same & some ways on how it can be done.
http://intridea.com/2011/4/22/why-open-source-company-culture-is-important

Why should you, as a developer, actively contribute to open source? — including helping land your next job to writing better code, developing REAL reputation.. It also talks about the barriers to open source contribution
http://intridea.com/2011/4/28/you-should-be-an-open-source-developer

If you are a student, open source can surely help you jump start your career
http://mashable.com/2011/05/13/open-source-students/

And yes, even after all this, people will have 1001 million reasons on why they don’t get involved with open source
http://brandonhays.com/blog/2011/05/03/why-i-still-dont-contribute-to-open-source/

Yes, open source software programmers are ROCKSTARS..!!!
http://www.kbedell.com/2011/04/28/open-source-developers-are-rock-stars/

and finally, some steps on how we can get newbies involved in open source
http://brandonhays.com/blog/2011/05/23/getting-newbies-involved-in-open-source/
Happy reading…