Getting Started with Social Innovation

Here’s the second of a small series of blog posts by Jeanne Bradford, a innovative leader with a track record at AOL, Cisco and Apple. Jeanne is a brilliant new product marketer and manager. She shares her wisdom and advice for accelerating innovation in today’s business environment.  B. 

How to get started using social innovation

When companies first applied social media to their enterprises, there was a big rush to implement a social strategy. Unfortunately, many companies stumbled because they jumped before they really understood the framework they needed to be successful. They needed new tools, processes, roles & responsibilities, and decision-making models for successful implementation. Getting the most out of social communities also requires changes in how organizations share information and make decisions. It’s critical to understand these nuances to optimize the effectiveness of this methodology.

We developed the Social Innovation Readiness Scorecard to quickly solve this problem and allow the management team to provide their organization with their best chance at success and ensure that you get the most out of increasing the quality of ideas while accelerating the rich collaboration that leads to groundbreaking innovation.

The Social Innovation Readiness Scorecard  is a decision-making tool that provides executives and teams with an objective view of their organizations’ capability to successfully implement social solutions to drive product innovation. The scorecard helps you determine whether or not the team is best prepared to launch a social solution by providing critical questions in ten areas. These include the current use of social technologies outside of product development, level of management commitment, social community resource expertise, maturity of tools, and organizational structure to support the requirements for best-in-class application of social communities. The Social Innovation Readiness Scorecard allows you to identify the critical areas that many organizations overlook and the weak areas that you need to address prior to launching a social development initiative.

The scorecard itself is a spreadsheet that you supplement with a group process. Typically, you would get a subset of your executive staff or senior directors together for a real-time meeting session (could be virtual) that would last one to two hours. To complete the scorecard, the team executes the following steps:

• Instruct your group on the definition of the various dimensions of readiness
• Each person in the group individually fills out their scorecards, ranking the readiness of your organization without discussion.
• The facilitator collects all the scores and computes the average and the standard deviation.
• In cases where the standard deviation is high, the facilitator asks some of the low-ranking individuals why they rated a dimension low and similarly why high-ranking individuals ranked it high.
• After comparing differences, your facilitator asks if anyone would like to change their ranking. This gives everyone an opportunity to vote based on a common understanding.