Added Value - part of the WPP marketing services group of companies - is the world’s leading brand development and marketing insight company with some 25 offices worldwide and a global client list that spans all categories.

 Dub have been working with Added Value for over three years, developing and enhancing a leading-edge digital insight and innovation tool that helps them to source the latest ideas, insights and opinions from consumers and experts around the world, without the need to bring together contributors - an activity that can prove costly and inefficient.  By both providing the social software and helping the client with some of the finer points of building and managing online communities, Dub has helped Added Value win more pitches, delivered more creative multimedia insight, and cemented its positioning as one of the leading industry innovators.

The platform, designed to support Added Value’s work - known as AV-id - makes use of micro-blogging, IM, forums, bulletin boards and media-sharing technologies, and harnesses the latest social networking behaviours to support live and ongoing dialogue among leading-edge consumers and experts from around the world. Added Value consultants are empowered with a unique moderation toolkit that allows them to interact directly with the community whilst sharing their thoughts and ideas with other members of the project team in both local and remote offices.

Driving actionable insight

By assigning members of the niche online communities structured tasks and activities, (of both a qualitative and quantitative nature), a stream of rich, multimedia insight and consciousness flows. Data visualisation tools such as tag clouds help strategists identify trending topics and emergent themes, and subsequently used to spot issues that require further investigation and probing.

Idea generation and collaboration innovation

Recognising that traditional research techniques can sometime be a one-way street, we worked with Added Value to develop a number of collaborative tasks and techniques that allow members of the communities to generate and share ideas, and then select winning ideas. This co-creation technique is widely accepted as a new paradigm that brands are quickly latching on to as they seek to enhance their innovation  capabilities.

Usability, training and adoption

Today,  many of us use social software in our own private lives, but relatively few are adopting them in the workplace to enhance productivity and, as in this case, support greater insight and connectedness.  Knowing this, we worked in partnership with Added Value on a rigorous education and adoption program for key Added Value stakeholders, including a regular series of global webinars and inspiration sessions. These sessions also provide the opportunity for valuable debate that feeds into the platform's ongoing development program.

The AV-id platform and  methodologies it supports are being deployed around the world everyday by Added Value, and in languages including Spanish, French, Polish, Japanese, Mandarin, Portuguese, Korean and Italian.

As well as being used to engage consumers and experts, AV-id is equally at home engaging internal stakeholders - marketers, R&D teams, designers etc - and creating internal innovation communities.

For Bel - a global food company - AVid was deployed to help marketers, R&D professionals and designers come together to create new ideas and innovative solutions to everyday problems they face.

To-date, brands including Pepsi Lipton International, Meetic, Tefal, Reliant Energy, and Barilla among others have embraced the AV-id approach.

CERTAINLY A. G. Lafley had his work cut out for him when he became Procter & Gamble's chief executive eight years ago. Profits were lackluster and the stock was way down. New product introductions had slowed to a trickle, and no more than 15 percent of those wound up making money.

A. G. Lafley

Mr. Lafley quickly cut jobs, sold declining brands like Crisco shortening, and began reciting what became a familiar mantra: Innovate, innovate, innovate. These days, he said, more than half of Procter's new products are commercially successful.

Mr. Lafley still thinks innovation is the key to success. And he has codified that thinking in a book, 'The Game-Changer', (Crown Business, 2008), which he wrote with Ram Charan, a management consultant.

In a recent conversation, Mr. Lafley elaborated on his views about innovation and on why a chief executive would become an author.

Q. You're already famous, I doubt you need the royalty money and I imagine that running P.& G. is a full-time job. Why would you write a book?

A. It was the last thing I wanted to do. But Ram said that, as long as he had access to other P.& G. people, he would only need 15 or 20 hours of my time, spread over a year and a half.

So I talked it over with Norm Augustine, our presiding director. And we decided that the book could advance P.& G.'s reputation as well as its strategy business model. So I said yes, and I'm donating any proceeds to charity.

Q. Reputation makes sense, but a strategy business model?

A. P.& G. was always really good at branding and commercializing products, but we weren't better than anyone else at that fragile front end, where the idea is created. So in 2000, we decided to stop being Fortress P.& G., and move to an open innovation system that could attract innovations of all stripes from the outside. We set a goal, that half of the innovations we take to market should have external front-end partners. And the book can help us attract those partners.

Q. But the book just came out. How have you attracted partners in the last few years?

A. We participate in Web networks, including one that taps our own retirees for ideas. We wanted to print Trivial Pursuit questions on Pringles, and one of these Internet networks helped us find a small bakery in Italy that knew a safe, edible way to print on baked goods.

We'll accept innovation help from any source, even competitors. We have a joint venture with Clorox on a press-and-seal wrap. We developed it, but it sells under the Clorox Glad brand. So we compete like crazy with Clorox on cleaning products, but partner with them on wraps.

Q. Innovation has become one of those words, like sustainability, that is so overused these days as to be almost meaningless. Why not just say invention?

A. Invention is just a new product or service. Innovation ties that idea to a better customer experience, and results in increased sales and profits. It lets you make unlikely connections that enable you to solve wickedly hard problems. It is a team sport that uses the expertise of people from a lot of different fields.

It also means identifying your consumers and involving them early on. These days, Internet technology makes it so much easier to do that.

And it is vitally important. Consumers turned away from the first few rounds of cellphones because no one had made them intuitive to use. But Apple turned a 10-year-old technology into the iPod, because it understood what young music lovers wanted.

Q. You're putting a lot of emphasis on outside voices. What about internal innovation?

A. The first thing we did was open the internal innovation architecture. We worked on getting engineers and biochemists to work with marketing, and we got people from our different businesses to work with each other.

Each of our businesses used to do its own research. But our core technologies span businesses. We can manipulate surfaces, for example, be they kitchen counters or blouses or hair.

Gil Cloyd, our chief technology officer, and I have set up what we call communities of practice. These are networks of nanotechnologists, of biochemists, of people who specialize in packaging, and who work for all the businesses. And we have regular innovation reviews, where we move ideas and best practices around our 22 businesses.

Q. And yet only half of your product innovations succeed. Why isn't the rate higher?

A. I don't really want it to be. Human nature is such that, if we push our people to drive the batting average up, they'll try to hit more safely, take a shorter swing, go for the singles instead of home runs.

But we try to set milestones that innovations must meet at every step along the development process. As soon as they miss one, we allocate the resources to another product moving through the funnel. That's another difference from the old days, when P.& G. let bad ideas go too far.

Q. In your book you say you are moving Procter away from food and beverages because they have limited innovation potential. But I see new flavors and ingredients all the time. Explain.

A. In beauty and household products, we have access to ingredients and formulas that our competitors really can't get. But when it comes to food, the private label guys can get anything we can get.

Q. So getting back to your role as a co-author, did you really hold your input to 20 hours?

A. Are you kidding? Writing this book was my early morning and late night activity for six months.

By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH
Published: May 24, 2008. NYTimes

A great article has appeared in MyCustomer.com here, written by Jennifer Kirby.

Bottom line, Jennifer establishes that staff are expensive; technology less so. Many organisations are starting to realise the benefits of driving customer transactions to self-service and self-help forums. That means your front line staff can be released to deliver customer insight into the heart of the organisation, and by involving them in this way the level of both innovation and customer solutions should increase sales through service.

Of most interest is that fact that supposedly between 40 and 90% of staff time is now wasted on unproductive tasks, and how such divergent operations as a retailer - in this case John Lewis - and local council - Haringey - are using similar tools and relationship management techniques to achieve success in making them consumer-centric.

Dub has long believed in workplace innovation, a form of closed open innovation if you like, but it's potential also to harvest new collaborative networks and end-user relationships is vast.

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

At this weeks innovation seminar in Amsterdam, titled 'Converting Consumer Insights into Actionable Results', General Motors' Head of New Media Developments, Steve Worrall, urged business to filter learnings made in new media to those with direct contact with customers or that manage customer interactions.

To a prestigious audience including Unilever, GlaxoSmithKline, Diageo and Nokia amongst others, Worrall commented 'If all our customers are out there talking, maybe we should be listening and getting involved in those conversations'. Worrall went on to site the Netherlands' own broadband provider UPC as an exemplar in how to use insight to improve customer service, as well as tapping customer service resources for new insights.

Our view is that customers can be their own customer service, using emerging social media user behaviours to seek out answers to their problems and thus creating major cost savings for business. To facilitate this however, business must adopt cultural shifts, removing walled gardens and sharing previously sensitive information with their customers.

Dub's Customer Communities provide the platform for the exchange of information and hosting new 'conversations'. Co-creation opportunities abound in such environments, bringing brand and consumer closer in partnership and generating increasing consumer advocacy.

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.

In a report titled 'How To Use Social Media To Engage Employees' (by Melcrum Publishing) that we recently cast our eyes over, there was a finding that I think all corporate and internal communicators should be witness to. When the head of ABN Ambro's Knowledge Management asked their worforce, all 100,000 of them, the question 'what percentage of your intellectual capital do you use', the response was staggering. The results came back with the response that 70% of staff felt that only 15 to 20% of their intellectual capital was being used! That's a lot of human capital and IP!

As you know, we don't preach that technology is the solution, but using social media tools within your organisation can help you identify talent, wherever it is hiding, and allow your staff to be heard. Your staff are your greatest asset, and often the most costly. Workplace (or employee) communities foster new relationships and internal networks, stimulate valuable new conversations and motivate people. If, as I suspect, there are a myriad of large corporations who could equally extract the same findings, surely now is the time to look at social networking behaviours to move forward and innovate.

The Big Switch, a new book by author Nicholas Carr is due out next Tuesday (Jan 08). The book, which takes the strapline 'rewiring the world, from Edison to Google', suggests the takeover of companies' IT by the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, akin to Dub's own business practice.

Our good selves, and the author of this book identify that the huge benefits and cost savings to business owners is through large scale use service and utility providers with considerable scale and expertise. Carr goes on to say "It may take decades for companies to abandon their proprietary supply operations and all the investments they represent. But in the end the savings offered by utilities become too compelling to resist, even for the largest enterprises."

At the close of 2007, leading global management consultants McKinsey published what they believe to be the eight emerging trends transforming markets and business. McKinsey share our approach by stating that 'Technology alone is rarely the key to unlocking economic value: companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business. Through our work and research, we have identified eight technology-enabled trends that will help shape businesses and the economy in coming years. These trends fall within three broad areas of business activity: managing relationships, managing capital and assets, and leveraging information in new ways'

The trends themselves are as follows:

1. Distributed co-creation
2. Using consumers as innovators
3. Tapping into a world of talent
4. Extracting more value from interactions
5. Expanding the frontiers of automation
6. Unbundling production from delivery
7. Putting more science into management
8. Making businesses from information

The report is a great read and one we recommend you access. We'd love to publish it all but it's a bit too long for our blogging principles! It is however available online and as an audio file. You can download the report here.

You could say that Dub are on to something if you believe all you read! We think we tick at least 5 of the eight boxes, so we must be trendy! We help businesses and brands harvest talent, and assist them in identifying how to put the collective intelligence and their newfound networks to work, creating competitive advantage. We're making it our mission to tell you more about this over the coming months, as well as sharing some of the exciting new work we're working hard at delivering.

The second edition of this conference has just been announced. For those of you with a budget - it's around $3,000 per delegate - and feeling they're not getting enough from their innovation cycles, it appears a worthy trip!

The conference aims to help business identify open-innovation models that streamline strategic decision making and analyse cultures that foster open-innovation. It also sets out to help you connect with suppliers and technology that can help you fuel innovation, though why you'd need to look further than this website is beyond me!

There will be some fairly prestigious speakers at the event, from the likes of P&G, General Electric, Cadbury Schweppes and IBM.

You can find out more about how to get to the event in Las Vegas on 26th and 27th February 2008 by clicking here. If you're UK-based and don't have the time or budget, you can arrange for DUB to present the future of Open Innovation by calling us at +44 (0) 20 89642657