Whenever someone rattles off the primary benefits of having social in the enterprise, they start with brand awareness, then sales, service, product innovation, internal and then it slopes off from there.  Yet when I look at all the examples that people share and listen to all the people in the space discuss corporate implementations, you don’t hear about many instances of product innovation and we’ll simplify it even more with just Innovation.

For this purpose, we will describe innovation as the generation, selection and implementation of ideas that drive value back to an organization.  Notice I did not specify where the ideas come from as there are many ways to solicit ideas.  Here are a few with optimum outcomes:

1. Employees: No one knows your business better. Lean on employees to innovate around internal processes, products, administrative, employee satisfaction.  Some ideation efforts might be for bounty (prize for the best idea, most profitable, etc), some might be collaborative with team submissions.
2. Customers: Often times companies stick an ideation platform out to customers and ask them to innovate.  The majority of the time I see this lead to more trouble than it’s worth.  The customers “ideas” are usually how to make the experience better and lead to incremental improvements.  This approach also becomes a time suck for the staff who has to manage it as well.  Customers are best used to provide ideas on what theywould  like most and do so in focused, campaign driven events.  This will help you manage staffing to evaluate the volume that comes from this channel.
3. Partners:  This group is arguably the ones who can bring the best ideas around efficiency, process, scaling and new innovations from the outside to incorporate.  Your partners are the experts in their specific domain and have an interest in selling you more things.  If you innovate with their ideas, then usually that will mean more business for the partner who suggested it.
4. Outside Experts: will bring the most ideas on new products, new business ideas and ideas that are more patentable.  These are people with a passion around your domain and have a “killer idea” for you.  The ideas from this group are not usually incremental, these are game changers.

As you can see there are many ways to innovate through ideas, however the outcomes will be very different based on what you ask for and who you ask.  This is an important point because up until now the majority of companies have asked for ideas in general just to say they are innovating.  That can become a very dicey situation. 

There is more to innovation that slapping up an idea management platform, asking for responses to a blog or even just having a form fill on your site.  At a very high level: Some ideas will run into IP issues (intellectual property), some incremental idea projects will simply overload the team and create more hassle than value.  Even if the ideas are all relevant, you need a way to triage them as the come in.  Once you get the ideas and sort them you will need to get them to the right people in your organization, create workflow and a way to create budget for implementation. 

The whole concept of innovating through the crowdsourcing of ideas is a powerful, yet underutilized strategy.  For those who do try to implement an ideation project, it becomes a tool deployment effort and not a true innovation effort.  That is the reason we are discussing this very concept this week through our weekly industry chat series around the “Business of Social Media”.  Usually we get an industry leader and bring them in to moderate the session for us.  Being in our 81st week of this project, we have had some dandy moderators.  This week may just be the best though .  Actually, I, Jason Breed am moderating this week.  I know how we vet our moderators to bring you the best of the best in order to raise the level of conversation and for that reason, I am honored that the team finally said it’s time for me to take one.  So here we go.  The topic and questions will be:

Topic: Ideation: Driving Innovation or Just Talk?

Q1:  What’s the difference between ideation, innovation, suggestion box?

Q2:  When do you make ideas open for public rating?

Q3:  What are key factors in making innovation programs successful?

The event will take place Tuesday, 10/12/10 at 12 noon ET.  The format will stay the same with the 1st question at 12 followed by Q2 at 12:20 then Q3 at 12:40.  Follow along on the conversation with #sm81 from your favorite Twitter client or simply follow our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.