Heroes is a talent business that helps its clients (businesses and agencies) find world-class innovation, creativity, branding and communication expertise on an as-needed basis - a kind of ‘talent on-tap’ offering. The talent - known as the Heroes - include such luminaries as Stephen Bayley, Kevin Duncan and Alistair Fee among others.

The business owners wanted to tackle how talent businesses operate by creating a powerful knowledge base and collaboration tool that delivered greater connectivity, networking and knowledge exchange. Despite counting some of the UK’s most prestigious creative and problem-solving minds as their asset, they were disparate and disconnected.

Working closely with the business owners, we designed a solution using an existing professional grade forum and KM  software package. Known as the Green Room, we customised the interface and functionality and created a communication and file-sharing structure that focused on three core area; Community Discussions, Work Opportunities and Idea Development.

Community Discussions
By engendering greater network connectedness, and turning some of the weaker ties into stronger, more collaborative ties, we created an online community of creative and branding experts. Community Discussions was a place where hot topics and general issues shared by the community through their work could be discussed, and where knowledge that could help solve briefs was located.

Work Opportunities
An innovative development was to provide a forum upon which not just briefs for talent were shared and discussed, but also a place where end-client briefs could be brainstormed and where participation could be activated.

Idea Development
We found that the Heroes themselves were an entrepreneurial group of individuals, so set about creating a space where their own business ideas could be cultivated by groups of like-minded and ‘interested’ collaborators. The collective intellectual property that was generated became a valuable asset to the business and it’s individual stakeholders alike.

Not only did the Green Room help innovate a traditional talent business, it provided a powerful collaboration tool the likes of which many of the Heroes themselves had not witnessed in their professional lives, but had become commonplace in their own social networking activities. We made full use of these behaviours such that the Heroes were able to adopt the new tool with ease. Heroes' new connectivity also brought about a new sense of belonging, companionship and a sense of 'we', which, when working on a contractual-basis, is often lacking.

Here’s what our client had to say about the experience, which naturally we’re rather pleased about;

Dub has been a very positive transformational force for my business.  Not only have they worked on a consultancy basis to create a culture of understanding around the complex issues of on-line networking, they have also worked very hard to create a networking structure that answers the needs of my business.  From the outset of this project, Dub has explained in a clear and jargon-free way the opportunities and potential downsides of setting up an web-based network.  In a sector in which it is easy to be dazzled and left bewildered by the technology of the process and to lose sight of the desired outcomes, dub have always been reassuringly 'non-techy', non patronising and yet have managed to operate at the forefront of the sector without making me feel left behind in my own project.

Throughout the whole project the dub men seemed to be as committed and enthusiastic about making my project work and work well as I was.  I never got the impression that  this was just another gig for them.

Dub does service, they do hard-nosed technical fulfillment and they do very sound consultancy. They are also good people to be around and a pleasure to talk to over lunch - not something I have ever said about anybody who has provided me with a technically-based service before!

We've said for a long time that online research communities provide better research experiences for both clients AND respondents, or members as we prefer to label them. Fun and enjoyment can be quite hard to measure, but seeing the feedback we've just received from a community that we've been running in Brazil, I think it speaks for itself. It's so good we had to share it with you.....

"I would like to thank you for the opportunity to be part of the project, I hope you enjoyed my ideas....I loved it and wanted you to know I did it with affection. I found it really cool, I hope you have received lots of good ideas."

and then there's this one..

"Thank you! I really liked taking part, I found it to be very dynamic and different."

and this one..

"I am available when if you need more research, okay? You can count on me."

I think you get the idea. These people thrived on the  creativity and fun that the tasks we designed offered them, and of course the very personal relationships they struck up with our moderators. I your research needs an injection like this, we'd love to hear from you.

Congratulations to Experian, Progressive and Vanguard for winning Forrester's inaugural Voice of the Customer Awards in NY yesterday. It's great to see that organisations that gather feedback and turn it into actionable insight to generate ROI are being recognised. It's a major task to gather feedback from the customer masses, and then collating and reporting on it at such a scale.

This new form of marketing is largely supported by some traditional skills combined with great new technologies including:

• Cloud Computing and the rise of the Software-as-a-Service business model
• Increased access to faster broadband
• Maturing social networking behaviours and social media tools
• API's that allow you to integrate mutliple systems such as CRM

All three companies awarded a prize emonstrated hat the voice of the customer was too valuable to ignore, and that by listening to and valuing individuals, the resultant insight and opportunities could propel the business through increased sales, greater advocacy and generally being regarded highly as a business that listens and acts upon what their customers are telling them.

At Dub we provide the tools to allow brands and organisations to do just this, whether it is your customers, your staff or even your suppliers that you want to engage and listen to.

I was saddended not to see any European businesses in this list, surely you are out there. If you are, and you think you should be represented in a more European-centric award scheme, let me know and we'll see what we can do about it.

We’ve recently had an international, multi-brand organisation benefit from using our web-based tools to gather ideas from their internal expert communities. It was a great project since a) the platform was deployed in a foreign language, and b) it allowed staff from all levels and various departments to come together to share their ideas. In effect, the brands were cross-fertilised and the resultant ideas were then opened out further for exploration, research and development by the relevant expert communities. Ideas were created and co-created by individuals and groups, thus providing a greater array and some more quirky, interesting thoughts.

This process of using staff to innovate collaboratively is fast becoming the norm thanks to the emergence of social media. What is especially interesting is that collaborative innovation provides a voice for all within the organisation, no matter what level they are. Young or old, Junior or Senior, Receptionist or Director - an idea can come from anyone, anywhere at any time.

Relative to this concept of providing your staff with a voice, and listening to them, Sainsbury’s - the UK’s oldest supermarket - has turned to it’s staff for help during these tough times. Justin King, CEO, needed fresh ideas to keep the supermarket ahead of it’s rivals. In a new Channel 4 program currently airing, King opened up the (shop) floor for ideas from his staff and gave a select few the opportunity to bring their ideas to life, to see if they could really make a difference.

In the first episode that I watched, a new employee of Sainsbury’s with a background in sales took to the floor and carried our face-to-face, or direct, sales. It was a hit, though it was clear that the personnel carrying out the sales had to be carefully selected. The lucky lady who came up with the idea and led the way is now in-charge of implementing the initiative across a number of stores as a further trial. Brilliant, bravo!

Organisations need to innovate during these tough economic times, and beyond. Collaborative innovation, and the identification of new leaders to bring it to life, is a strategy that should always be considered, given the right tools and support. Here at Dub we help our clients generate and manage ideas, spot the best talent and drive innovation using our proprietary technology and added value service. For more information, contact Stephen Cribbett

The UK's favourite retailer, Marks & Spencer, has garnered a lot of media attention recently following its decision to raise the price large bras by £2. The media I refer to is of course not only the tabloids, but social media and those vocal customers versed in using it to rally the crowds. Perhaps the best example of the groundswell is a Facebook group called Busts4Justice which as of today stood with over 17,000 members!

An organisation the nature of M&S - large, customer-facing, national/international - clearly had a business case to support their action, however, their reputation took a dive not only because of the decision they took, but the lack of engagement and consultation that took place ahead of making the decision and presenting the price hike to the public.

Social media allows consumers with a shared passion or common interest - in this instance large breasts - to hyper-connect and create unilateral campaigns that have been known to have an immense negative impact on reputation, brand trust and loyalty. Turn social media on it's head and it presents the perfect medium with which brands can engage in conversation and discussion with consumers, be it in an public or private environment.

As a business that helps and advises brands how to use social media to engage with consumers and staff, we take much from a story like this. The lessons to learn include:

Trigger the conversation, don't wait for it to happen - Before the announcement were made, but at the time of it being discussed internally, locate consumer that are already having conversations around this topic or subject, and invite them into a private conversation. These people will by their very nature be the most vocal and passionate since they are already sharing their views and opinions in the public domain. Knowing where to find them can take time and expertise, but the chances are there will be a public forum somewhere out there where they are already active.

Listen carefully - Once you've triggered a discussion, pay attention carefully and listen to the views and opinions of your customers. Use three ears to do it if necessary! Researchers and moderators have the necessary skills to do this as well as interpreting the information being shared, so consider using them.

Empathise - As the issue or decision is made public, continue to listen and acknowledge points that are being raised. Your Community Manager(s) should provide the voice of your brand at this stage.

Reward - Acknowledgement and involvement with the decision-making process are forms of reward, but there are many others. Loyalty schemes and price promotions are other forms that cab used (within retail businesses), whereby you nurture the customer relationships you have by offering them discounts on other associated products (in the case of M&S where the hike was publicised, for example).

The result of M&S not following some of these recommendations resulted in a very public u-turn, which despite giving customers their requests, left M&S bruised and with a new layer of distrust.

A new survey by leading senior marketing executives networking group MENG suggests that business is increasingly looking towards external collaborations as the source for new ideas and innovation.

62% of senior marketers questioned rated crowdsourcing and collaboration as either effective or highly effective, compared to 73% who said the same of internal research and development (R&D), and 63% for employee contributions (workplace innovation).

Most intriguing of all, only a measly 54% rated the use of traditional consulting firms and professional services firms as an effective source for new ideas.

The main pillars for crowdsourcing are:

• Self select / self organisation
• Meritocracy's
• Open-source development (Linux, Wikipedia, Google open API etc.)
• Customer service via mass collaboration

These findings are great news for the practitioners and followers of crowdsourcing and the open-source movement, however, what it doesn't highlight is the reasons underpinning this shift. A need for greater democracy is clear in emerging markets, but pressure to follow the example of such leading lights as IBM, Lego and Dell is perhaps going to lead to as many poor imitations as good.

For business to capitalise on the wisdom of the crowd, the right environment must be created. Business needs to be aware of the great challenges of the mechanisms of sharing & distributing co-created value (reward), be it of a social, emotional or financial measure.

HP, we're told, is reorganising their HP Labs facility to address "the most complex challenges facing technology customers in the next decade". The reorganisation will take in a more open approach, with the pursuit of 20 to 30 large research projects as a primary focus.

HP Labs has also created an Open Innovation Office "responsible for deepening HP Labs strategic collaborations with this in academia, government and the commercial sector"

Given all this fighting talk we couldn't resist making a beeline for the area that most excites us, their open innovation platform called HP Idea Lab.

On arrival we couldn't work out whether we were at an advertising platform, brand site or, as they say, an open innovation platform. It certainly didn't carry the features or activities of any open innovation platform we'd experienced! (IBM's Innovation Jam would be worth you checking out at this point if you're new to open innovation).

The richness of the interface gives it the perception of, say, a gaming or ad platform, whereas the type of platform they aspire to encourages participation and engagement through ease-of-use and established user behaviours. OK, so you can move the big colourful blocks around the screen. So what! What might the reorganisation of these squares tell you about your participants? Absolutely nothing.

Entering into one of the, er, colour blocks , you get a demo of some of the new technologies and initiatives HP are developing. And there the experience effectively ends.

There are opportunities to bookmark the site, comment on a HP blog and send to a friend, but these alone do not justify the label 'open innovation'. Sadly, HP have tried to reinvent the wheel rather than hook onto existing social media tools and user behaviours to get the audience to share their thoughts, refine ideas and become advocates. Henry Chesbrough states that open innovation is 'the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate innovation", yet HP appear to have done everything possible to stifle interactivity and sharing by presenting a poor user-interface. Our advice to HP is drop the whizzes and the bangs and focus on how best to get your very specific and passionate audience thinking about and interacting with your work and theology, and not just the visual design of the interface. Think about

Henry Chesbrough is Executive Director of the Centre for Open Innovation, a unit of the Institute of Management, Innovation, and Organization at UC-Berkeley, and leading figure in the world of innovation and open-innovation per se. Here's what they have to say on the subject;

Open Innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate innovation. With knowledge now widely distributed, companies cannot rely entirely on their own research, but should acquire inventions or intellectual property from other companies when it advances the business model.

Open Business Models create value by leveraging many more ideas, due to their inclusion of a variety of external concepts, and can also enable greater value capture, by using a key asset, resource, or position not only in the company's own business model but also in other companies' businesses.

The headline grabbing World Economic Forum held at Davos later this month is focusing on the Power of Collaborative Information. Collaboration as an approach in itself is nothing new, and we are all well aware that to bring innovation to market requires the input of many. On the one hand you can introduce the notion of fast-failing by collaborating with the crowd. On the other hand, collaborative projects pose greater risk due to their more disruptive output. With collaborative frameworks and communities in place, diversity and thus innovation will flourish. NESTA has identified one other key challenge to innovation being the need to allow workers time in their day to work on outside projects and interests. They call it Google's 80/20 rule.

Davos presents a collaboration between business leaders, artists, entertainers and policy makers. If it does prove to be the social, collaborative platform upon which to develop solutions to the world's problems then long may it live. If, like any socially enhanced innovation platform, it fails to encourage participation of the wider community then the crowd must vote.

It seems the McKinsey trend report that we highlighted in our recent post here has got you talking about the future. One reader of the report pointed me to this slightly older, but nonetheless equally poignant report published by The Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by Cisco Systems.

The report available here, titled 'Collaboration: Transforming The Way Business Works' establishes some of the following key points:

• Companies are facing a new imperative to form collaborative relationships.
• Successful collaboration requires a cultural shift which is already well under way
• Companies face challenges in measuring and monitoring the benefits of collaboration
• Despite the promise of technology, there is still dissatisfaction with online collaboration tools

So if, as the report states, the future belongs to those who collaborate then business needs to address not only the method of engagement with their collaborators, be they clients suppliers, customers, experts academics or employees, then a cultural change needs to take place within the business. The most successful example of this shift taking place is perhaps over at IBM under the visionary leader and CEO Sam Palmisano. Collaboration and co-creation requires businesses to open up and be more tactile. The Innovation Jam is a good starting point in terms of a platform for collaboration. Some basic tips for business leaders are be open and honest, sharing and flexible and talk more....