I'm thrilled to host 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.
Social Technology: The New Secret Weapon for Accelerating Innovation & Speed in Product Development
By Jeanne Bradford
Never has it been more important to innovate on an accelerated timeline. Yet many companies are stuck in the myth that you cannot achieve both innovation and speed in new product development. This is not true!
Our research has found that you can get both by tapping the collective minds of your employees and your customers to ideate faster by using social technologies. Many companies use social solutions in marketing and customer support, but they can also apply them to the product development process to increase both innovation and time to market.
The most important aspect of applying social technologies to product innovation is the ability to create a “community” of technical thought leaders where they can share, build upon, and develop ideas. However, you need a methodology to prioritize and implement these solutions. You can apply social communities internally to harness the innovative thinking and problem solving across the company. You can also use them as an ideation and collaboration platform with your customers. For geographically dispersed organizations, social solutions are a superior method for gathering, evaluating, and managing internal ideas. And there are several third-party social collaboration tools that are available from companies including Spigit,
BrightIdea, Communispace and Innocentive, to help you collect and manage the new set of data that comes with social innovation.
While similar to the concepts of Open Innovation, broader research demonstrates that applying social technologies can extend throughout the entire product life cycle. The use of community can add value to innovation and accelerate product delivery beyond ideation to product design, testing and early feedback.
The application of new social technologies in the product development space is a new approach for companies, and we see it becoming an increasingly important methodology. TCGen conducted a benchmark study to identify what companies are applying social technologies to product development and to identify emerging best practices. Here are the key takeaways: