I’ve just watched a webinar titled “The Impact of Social Media on Innovation,” featuring Josh Bernoff. It is about how to generate innovation by leveraging the social media “groundswell”. These are some of the key points, which I find interesting:

• Customer-driven Innovation Cycle – Discovery (identification of consumers’ latent needs), Design (the use of consumer feedback to tune launch and execution), Deployment (sharing of consumer needs to generate innovations),

• New Approach to Innovation
  • Consumer involvement – from structured to spontaneous
  • Corporate posture – from go out to consumers’ to invite consumer in
  • Environment – from linear, pipeline to controlled chaos
  • Consumer needs – from explicit to ‘explicit and latent
  • Tools – from surveys, focus groups, story boards to search, blogs, communities
• Innovation software
  • Innovation Platforms for managing ideas
  • Innovation Events for event-based collaboration
  • Innovation Communities to leverage the insights of the customer
• Examples of collaborative innovation
  • Captive communities
  • Beta test bed
  • Idea communities
  • Suggestion boxes
  • Product ratings

Josh Bernoff is the co-author of Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. I’ve blogged about it here.

For those who have missed the webinar, below are the Skitch‘d presentation slides of “The Impact of Social Media on Innovation” (note: two ‘intro’ slides are missing):

The Impact of Social Media on Innovation – Josh Bernoff originally appeared on GreyReview on August 29, 2008.

Over the weekend, I have an interesting encounter with Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, authors of the book, Groundswell – Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies (Harvard Business Press, 2008), on Twitter. While reading, I was twittering ideas extracted from the book and thoughts that bubbled up (see below – extracted from ‘twitter.com/limyh’):

While I was tweeting on Groundswell, quite unexpectedly Josh Bernoff tweet’ed me. Then, he was scanning tweet conversations on ‘Groundswell’. A few hours later, Charlene Li messaged me: “I loved your chapter by chapter tweets.” How unexpected! (See below)

This is an interesting case of how authors (and businesses, celebrities, etc.) can easily scan tweet conversations, with apps such as Summize and Twitscoop, and feel the ‘social pulse’ and listen to opinions about their products, brands, etc. Tools such as Twitter and Technorati are powerful tools to understand the mind of your customers.

Li and Bernoff wrote in Groundswell, “in the era of groundswell, listening is easy. Not listening, on the other hand, is criminal” (p. 93). They went on: “Listeners inevitably feel the temptation to respond by talking within the groundswell, by publishing blogs, contributing to user-generated content sites, and setting up communities” (p. 98). Both Groundswell authors certainly walk their talk!

Groundswell is an excellent how-to book. It offers insights into how enterprises can leverage the ‘social’ forces to build brand, create & sustain customer relationships and innovate offerings. It provides interesting perspective on the emerging nature of producer-consumer relationship. Additionally, the case studies presented in the book are both engrossing and enlightening. For those who are interested to understanding social technologies and its impact on the way you ‘listen’ and ‘talk’ to your customers, do yourself a favor and read the book!

My Twitter Encounter with ‘Groundswell’ Authors originally appeared on GreyReview on June 16, 2008.