Game Mechanics Make Customer Co-Creation More Streamlined and Fun

PLEASANTON, CA, Dec 06, 2011 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) – Spigit, the crowd innovation company, today announced enhanced game mechanics, crowd collaboration and social ideation for SpigitEngage for Facebook version 2.0, helping organizations everywhere tap into the wisdom and engagement of over 800 million active Facebook users.

“Today’s workers and consumers are social in new ways,” said Paul Pluschkell, CEO, Spigit. “To understand the future of business engagement, consider the draw of Facebook and gaming aspects of Zynga. Now imagine applying those social features to the enterprise to create business opportunities. That’s Spigit.”

SpigitEngage for Facebook is pioneering the way companies use Facebook to connect with customers and as an innovation forum. By capturing the customers and fans that are already congregating online, Spigit adds a layer of engagement to the social platform that allows crowds to engage in the innovation process with their favorite brands, and that helps those brands identify influential fans and cultivate customer loyalty.

With Nielsen calculating Americans spend 23 percent of their time online on social networks, and 53 billion total minutes on Facebook in the month of May 2011 alone, companies need a new way to harness the power of the crowd for business innovation. The latest SpigitEngage for Facebook release does that with game dynamics and social features including:

• Virtual currency and stores – allowing users to earn and spend tokens for their participation and interaction.
• Social Connections – using Follow Feeds to keep users up-to-date on other users’ activities and new ideas on Facebook, as well as enabling a more social discovery of new content.
• Contests – creating a purposeful, two-way dialogue for customer insight and co-creation.

The release of SpigitEngage for Facebook 2.0 continues to provide organizations with the tools they need to evolve into a social business and leverage the networks that have become a meeting ground for crowds to exchange information and collaborate with brands. For more information visit www.spigit.com .

About Spigit

Contact Information

• Media Contacts:
  KT McGraw
  SHIFT Communications
  617-779-1822
  spigit@shiftcomm.com
  
  Mili Patel
  Spigit
  925-452-6523
  mpatel@spigit.com

Copyright 2011 Marketwire, Inc., All rights reserved.

The other day, I had occasion to prepare an adoption forecast for a service, and, like any good innovator who knows anything, I formulated my answer using a nice s-curve shaped curve.

S-curves are such a useful tool for forecasting the adoption of anything – particularly anything that involves communication and collaboration – because they describe how the phycology of an adoption decision works.

People don’t, as it happens, just randomly decide to try something new, unless they’re super risk unsensitive. For most people, its necessary to see someone you know and trust doing something new before you’ll be confident enough to do it too.

There’s much additional material available on this here.

Anyway, so I prepare my adoption forecast, which was predicated on quite slow take-up at the beginning, followed by rapid growth later on. I felt I was on pretty safe ground here, since every other new introduction I’ve ever been associated with has had just this pattern.

As usual, however, those who saw the forecast were struck by how “conservative” my numbers were. This is a very common response, actually, because people always hate it when you suggest a new shiny object is not going to be an instant hit the moment it comes onto the market.

Hits – or actually the great myth that they exist in the first place – is the core topic of my book Sidestep and Twist.

Anyway, this got me to wondering: why is it people are so wedded to this idea that success comes instantly, and if it doesn’t your product is a failure?

Looking back on all the business cases I’ve seen over the years, I have come to a theory: most demand forecasts are done on the basis that demand is a linearly increasing function of time, or that there will be a big spike in sales at launch (coupled with a marketing push, I suppose), followed by steady growth.

The former seems to be what people put forward if they have a marketing budget, the latter if they don’t.

Then, of course, everyone is disappointed when their grand projections don’t come to pass.

On the other hand, if you create a realistic projection based on the actual innovation science which exists, everyone goes, “boring!”. I mean, who wants to invest in an s-curve when there are plenty of other business cases floating around which have flashy peaks or nice linear growth?

Anyway, me ranting on about this really doesn’t do anything to help anyone.

However, this is just one of many areas of the innovation management space where there’s lots of opportunity for vendors to make a real difference in the outcomes businesses achieve from their investments.

Problems like these are things the team and I are focusing on right now, and I think you’ll be interested to see what Spigit has coming in 2012.

By Steve Sechrist
Nov 16, 2011

Getting customer feedback into new products has always been a good idea.  Now Pleasanton, CA based Spigit, a self-described crowd innovation company, is making a game of that process with its new FaceOff application. By turning voting on brand directions into a game, the company looks to engage their customers while generating new ideas.

Consumer to Brand Collision

With FaceOff, the company is targeting the space where consumers and brands intersect, or “consumer to brand collision” as they like to say.  It incorporates the larger role consumers are playing in brand innovation, leveraging the power behind social networking tools to facilitate product adoption and customer engagement.

Paul Pluschkell, founder and CEO of Spigit, put it this way:

Through the process, an engaged consumer community emerges, that encourages players to share, vote and rate ideas as they are generated during the game. The technology drives this engagement with a points and awards system and social recognition. Examples of prizes include gifts from coffee shops, furniture retailers and other popular brands. On the web site, Disney, Sony, Ford, Apple, McDonalds, Ikea are all present. FaceOff then aggregates the results to identify the most popular and viable ideas as judged by their customers.

The Company said it will make the capability generally available in the next version of its software, SpigitEngage.

By: Courtney Boyd Myers

Does crowdsourcing innovation work? Yes, and here’s how.

It may come as no surprise that 98% of business and government executives say innovation will be critical to the success of their organizations over the next five years. I suppose that 2% compromise the hot dog stand chefs in New York City.

Many believe that innovation is by nature a social activity, something that results from creative collisions, idea exchange and new social stimuli. We’ve seen the rise of crowdsourced innovation in recent years with companies like Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, GOOD Magazine and OneSky paving the way.

Spigit, a “crowd innovation company” is using idea management technology that helps employees innovate where they work, in addition to their every day functions. Spigit says its helping companies harness the outliers in their workforce, and move R&D efforts past the core.

A creator, strategist and athlete, Paul Pluschkell, CEO and founder of Spigit, is nothing short of dynamic. For over 18 years, Pluschkell has founded and led successful and profitable high-tech strategic organizations for both private and public companies. We caught up with Pluschkell to discuss the current trend of crowdsourcing and if it really works for innovation.

CBM: In the past, who did humanity rely on for innovation?

Paul Pluschkell: Historically, humanity relied on a select few – the chosen ones. This small group was willing to risk everything to move us forward, technologically and socially. Even in more recent years, innovation has been an activity reserved for a core group of R&D experts, elite group of decision-makers, or the irregular individual who has the risk appetite necessary to innovate.

However, that doesn’t mean people lack creativity or insight – and technology is becoming a new outlet to capture that.

CBM: How has technology changed this?

PP: Today, technology is approachable, meaning it’s easier to access and work with, which results in a much greater percentage of early adopters. Through the progression of the web to social platforms, for the first time in human history, we are seeing the emergence of digital commons – platforms where the ethos and the expectation is that you participate.

For innovation, these digital commons are solving a historical issue that limited progress –the scale of interaction. It was never possible to put thousands of people in the same room and have them work together to find the golden egg. It was impossible to know others’ ideas, and there was no way to harness the rich, cognitive diversity of people. These digital commons have been a watershed development in enabling and accelerating a broader innovation approach. Today’s technologies are enabling companies to not only spread a wider net in their search for innovation, but also to encourage collaborative behaviors that evolve raw ideas into well thought out concepts that will deliver value to the organization.

CBM: What are the downsides of relying on crowdsourcing for innovation?

PP: As far as I can tell there is only one serious drawback – and that is if you ask for a crowd’s participation, you need to be prepared to act. Engagement and desire to participate needs to be fueled, and nothing turns crowds off more than if you simply ignore them.

CBM: What are the upsides of using a crowd as a service?

PP: Consider all of the things a crowd can do – crowd innovation and ideation, crowd problem solving crowd labor, crowdfunding, crowd design and identification and community building to name a few. Why wouldn’t you ask the crowd?

We’ve seen it work on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, with the crowd almost always leading to the right answer. Crowds multiply the force and possibility of what we do, especially when it comes to intellectual and knowledge economies. Collectively, a crowd offers scale and diversity of thinking that provides faster problem-solving with more knowledge and expertise infused in the process. There are more ideas to choose from, and more powerful ones than when they originate and end with a limited group of people.

Another benefit is the engagement crowd participation drives. By providing transparency and visibility within your organization, employee morale and customer loyalty stand to improve significantly.

CBM: What are 5 crowdsourcing best practices?

PP:

1. Set goals. Articulate the problem and give your audience a specific challenge or clarity around the end goal. Framing the questions is vital to success.
2. Practice cross-fertilization. Executive sponsorship is important at the onset to gather crowds, but don’t limit participants to a single area of expertise or department within a business. Bringing together different thinkers results in bigger, better ideas.
3. Make it fun. There needs to be a social recognition and a game quality to make what is ultimately a problem-solving task attractive to participants. Integrate game mechanics and voting, or prizes to motivate the crowd.
4. Be committed. Be prepared for a continuous feedback loop – to provide an answer, take action or just simply acknowledge the crowds contributions.
5. Allocate back-end resources. On the front-end, things like communication and motivation are critical. Once the ideas start rolling in, there needs to be curation and filtering, along with plans to put the contributions into action.

CBM: What are 5 tips for employees to be able to innovate where they work in addition to everyday functions?

PP: 

1. Go for it. You have a lot to offer – jump in. Make innovation a part of your every day routine.
2. Don’t limit yourself to your job description. Embrace opportunities and look for chances to leave your comfort zone.
3. Collaborate. Tap into coworkers and friends. Get input from the crowd on your idea to take it to the next level.
4. Speak up, even if it means risking failure. You’ll never know if your idea has potential if it isn’t shared.
5. Learn from others and make new connections.

CBM: What are 5 ways managers can help their employees innovate?

PP:

1. Give employees the time, tools and resources needed. Create a culture of innovation through learning, sharing and continual support for creativity and co-creation.
2. Put a spotlight on innovation. Create a challenge, increase communication around idea initiatives and make it a goal.
3. Practice it yourself. Hold brainstorms and group feedback sessions to help surface new ideas.
4. Motivate employees to participate with social or public recognition.
5. Make it safe to present ideas and make far reaching suggestions.

CBM: What are the 3 most important characteristics of an innovative culture?

PP:

1. Executive sponsorship – it’s not just checking a box off or a nod of the head. The people at the top of an innovative culture walk the walk.
2. Innovation requires systematic processes, structure and stimuli. Innovative cultures have the tools and education in place to make it work.
3.  It’s a daily part of everything you do. It becomes part of company DNA.

CBM: Have you heard of the company Prehype? What do you think of it and how is Spigit taking a different approach?

PP:  Prehype is an interesting concept. The fact is that companies have the creative people ready to engage. However, management needs to create a culture that unearths those people, the ‘intrapreneurs’, through education, tools and the ability to take action. That will give a company the best chance of survival in today’s hypercompetitive environment.

CBM: What are a few small, but very important and often overlooked qualities that a company needs to be innovative?

PP: I can’t stress how important it is to analyze the community metrics – from the topics the crowd is most passionate about to what motivates an individual to participate. Companies need to monitor their crowds and make continuous improvements, whether incremental or radical, to create the highest levels of engagement possible.

CBM: How important are things like company healthcare, vacation days and competitive pay to keep a company innovative?

PP: Innovation is not limited to products. The best companies recognize that to be innovative in their products and services, they must also embrace innovation in management, technology and everything that they do. Workplace perks and competitive employer tactics contribute to innovation by keeping employees engaged and passionate. At Spigit, we’ve set aside a $10,000 budget for employees to personalize their workspace.

PLEASANTON, CA–(Marketwire – Nov 15, 2011) – Spigit, the crowd innovation company, today announced the launch of their “FaceOff” application, a new brand ideas game. FaceOff allows consumers to contribute and vote on ideas that they’d like their favorite brands to pursue, and identifies ideas with the top potential for further development. Spigit will be demonstrating FaceOff at the Enterprise 2.0 conference today.

The idea for FaceOff spawned from the larger role consumers are playing in brand innovation. This contribution has been facilitated by the improved ease of use of social networking tools and their growing adoption rates. FaceOff takes this consumer-to-brand collision and makes it purposeful in the context of a gaming environment.

“Spigit was at the cutting edge of innovation management four years ago when we introduced prediction markets to the innovators toolbox,” said Paul Pluschkell, founder and CEO, Spigit. “Today we’re showing the first of our new techniques for activating crowds by rethinking the way you capture crowd preference.”

FaceOff allows consumers to engage with each other and the brands they love in a simple, game-driven environment where they contribute brand ideas and rate them in order to unearth the most popular ideas and the most viable players. The game creates an engaged consumer community by encouraging players to vie for a top spot on the leaderboard in order to gain social recognition and points as they vote on, submit, and share ideas via social channels. Aggregated across a crowd, FaceOff uses these preference choices to create a powerful and sophisticated way of identifying ideas that hold the greatest potential.

Players can win prizes by contributing ideas for the world’s largest coffee chain, furniture retailer and other popular brands. The Company will make the capability generally available in the next version of its software, SpigitEngage. For more information about FaceOff, please visit faceoff.spigit.com/.

About Spigit
Spigit, the crowd innovation company, creates a new paradigm for realizing untapped business value, connecting employees, customers and business partners for innovation and insight discovery. Using social technology and the power of crowds, Spigit’s solutions tap into the collective intelligence of an organization and transform it into actionable, predictive information. By incorporating an effective mixture of game mechanics, social recognition and rewards, idea graduation, and idea trading, Spigit allows companies to harness the social capital within their internal and external communities and pinpoint the ideas that drive revenue and generate cost savings. The largest and most innovative companies in the world use Spigit to drive corporate success and create an unmatched competitive advantage, including Overstock.com, AAA, US Bank, City of New York, Estee Lauder and Capgemini. For more information about how you can enable crowd innovation for your enterprise, visit www. Spigit.com, email info@spigit.com or call 1-855-SPIGIT1.

About the Enterprise 2.0 Conference
The Enterprise 2.0 Conference explores the integration of social and collaborative technologies in the enterprise, from both strategic and tactical perspectives. This Conference and Expo Pavilion focuses on the tools and best practices to drive business performance across workforce, customers, and partners’ networks. As part of Enterprise 2.0 Conference, The BrainYard, the first website community providing news, analysis and insights on fast-changing developments within the evolving world of social business was launched as a joint venture with UBM TechWeb’s InformationWeek to serve the growing social business market. For more information on Enterprise 2.0 Conference visit www.e2conf.com.

Media Contacts:
KT McGraw
SHIFT Communications
617-779-1822
spigit@shiftcomm.com

Christel Mes
Spigit
925-230-9332
cmes@spigit.com

John Schwartz explores how the economy and lack of engineers is hindering U.S. innovation. There is competition with India and China who produce almost 1 million engineers annually. How can the U.S. maintain its edge? Will the U.S. be the origin of the next big thing?

November 09, 2011 14:55 ET

Crowd Innovation Solution Recognized by Press and Analyst Community

PLEASANTON, CA–(Marketwire – Nov 9, 2011) – Spigit, the crowd innovation company, has been named a silver winner in the Enterprise Product of the Year category in the Best in Biz Awards, the only national business awards program judged by members of the press and industry analysts.

Spigit’s leading crowd innovation solution, SpigitEngage, was recognized in the awards’ inaugural year alongside a number of global industry leaders, such as Marketo, Hubspan, Conduit and Sandisk. SpigitEngage activates crowds by integrating emergent social collaboration with traditional workflow and analytics, enabling purposeful social innovation that drives results for business.

The 2011 Best in Biz Awards were presented in more than 30 categories including Best Overall Company of the Year, Most Innovative Company of the Year, Executive of the Year and Best New Product of the Year. More than 150 entries were received in this year’s awards program, from a wide array of public and private companies from a variety of industries, sectors and regions. The companies that won gold, silver and bronze awards in this year’s program represent the best in American business.

“We’re really excited to be awarded this honor as it reflects the acknowledgement from press and industry analysts that Spigit is the crowd innovation leader,” said Paul Pluschkell, Founder and CEO, Spigit. “These awards just reinforce Spigit’s commitment to helping Fortune 500 companies activate their crowd to deliver innovative ideas for competitive advantage. We are proud to power the increasing pace of innovation with a strong crowd innovation solution.”

Winners of the 2011 Best in Biz Awards were determined by scores from a panel of high-caliber judges from top-tier business and technology publications, as well as analyst firms, including: Accounting Today, AllBusiness.com, ECT News Network, eWeek Channel Insider, Financial Times, Fox News, Hartford Business Journal, Insight Media, Kelsey Group, King Features Syndicate, Lab Reviews, Network World, PC Magazine, Portfolio, Puget Sound Business Journal, Tech.Blorge, Tech-Gaming, Techtalk and Wired. The 20 judges on this year’s panel boast more than 470 years of combined experience and have written for a combined total of more than 180 consumer, business, financial, trade and technology publications nationwide.

For a full list of gold, silver and bronze winners in Best in Biz Awards 2011, visit: http://www.bestinbizawards.com/2011-winners/.

About Spigit

About Best in Biz Awards

Contact Information

• Media Contacts:
  KT McGraw
  SHIFT Communications
  617-779-1822
  spigit@shiftcomm.com
  
  Christel Mes
  Spigit
  925-230-9332
  cmes@spigit.com

November 09, 2011 07:31 ET

Enables Real-Time Social Discovery Across the Connected Enterprise

Over the last week, I was in Singapore with Microsoft and others. Whilst I was there, I found these things interesting enough to note… and comment on.

Having a bright idea now takes 20 years longer

“ALBERT Einstein famously declared anyone who hadn’t made a scientific breakthrough by the age of 30 never would. That was by and large true when, in 1905, at age 26, he proposed his special theory of relativity, E=MC2. Today, the “mean age of great achievement” is 48, according to a study of the life and accomplishments of 525 scientists who won a Nobel prize in physics, chemistry and medicine between 1901 and 2008″

Well that is certainly a relief, as I had been about to consign myself to the creativity dustbin. I look forward to the world change I will bring about in just a few short years from now. Seriously, though, I’ve always wondered about this notion that you have some short and finite time before which you become so set in your ways you can’t make a difference. I know I have observed on multiple occasions that people in large organisations exhibit this trait, but I’ve always wondered whether this was a symptom of an environmental thing endemic to those who’ve stayed in the same job for 20 years or more. Now I know.

Steve Jobs’ Credo “I’ll know it when I see it”

Steve Jobs was a tweaker, Malcolm Gladwell writes… he notes that tweakers who perfect inventions often bring about more progress than the original inventors

This is the core and central theme of my next book, Sidestep and Twist, out shortly. Time and time again, the great money making inventions of the last two decades have proved not to be the significant breakthroughs you’d expect, but incremental improvements on what went before. This, of course, is an anathema to anyone who believes the great corporate myth of our time: that if you are first with something genuinely new, you have a chance to get rich. The reverse is usually true.

Innovation Multipliers

According to a study by Booz & Co., more than two-thirds of large companies increased their investment in innovation last year… that said, another interesting finding of the study was that not all of the big innovators are big spenders; some of the most successful at developing new products and services invested significantly less in R&D. 

The relationship between research spending and profits has always been somewhat remote.  The reason is the same one as that noted above: breakthroughs have not usually been all that significant money makers. There is a good economic reason for this, actually, which is breakthroughs are usually too expensive, or too complex, or too under-performing when they’re first discovered to actually be that much use to people. As history has shown us, they usually take many years to mature to the point where it is actually possible to get to critical mass and make a profit.

 Facebook’s Zukerberg Dishes on ‘War’ with Google, Apple

If Apple or Google wants to build a product, they typically go build it,” Zuckerberg continued. “Whereas if Facebook wants to make it so that we want to re-think the way people listen to music or watch movies, what do we do? We build a platform on top of which people can connect and we enable all these different companies, dozens of companies, to plug in.

As we have seen in the case of Facebook’s wholesale destruction of MySpace, usually those who can get a platform adopted (where a platform is a two-sided market which unites multiple groups of customers) wins. The other core principle in Sidestep and Twist is those companies which build platforms will have a sustainable competitive advantage over everyone else; and those who continue with features, perhaps with some antiquated protections based on patents, trade secrets or copyrights, will eventually lose.

The other day, I saw the stunning infographic (below, via TechCrunch) which documents the shape of Android. As multiple other commentators before me have remarked, it shows just how fragmented the platform has become from the perspective of developers and, of course, users.

There are few Android users I  know, actually, who don’t tell stories of the problems they’ve had trying to get this app to work on that phone. And don’t mention the problems they all have trying to upgrade the operating system, if indeed they’re able to at all.

Let me pause, also, for a moment and say this is not going to be a post about the superiority of iPhone, either.  That is a handset which has its own faults.

But the point is this: platforms, like Android, are specific economic constructs. They work because there are two groups of customers, and consumption in one group triggers consumption in the other. The two groups, in this case, are handset users and application developers, and, as we all know the name of the game in the smartphone race, these days, is how many apps you have. And, in order to get the most Apps, developers have to see you have the most users to cause them to be interested to write for the platform in the first place.

The strategic blunder of Android is it is not one platform, but many. If you are a developer, in order to get to as many customers as possible, you have to write your app multiple times to accommodate each operating system and hardware combination. Now, you may do that for the biggest customer groups, but you probably won’t do it for all.

On the other hand, if you’re a user, you prefer to go to the handset which has the most applications, at least after intrinsic features such as design, price, and what all your friends are using have been taken into account.

In time, as Android develops, it will continue to fragment, because handset manufacturers will continue to customise their offers to differentiate. And that means, over time, the universe of possible applications that will work on each handset and operating system combination will shrink, not grow from the perspective of each customer over time. Developers will always move to the newest combinations and abandon the old ones.

People always point out the market share figures of Android versus iPhone and declare a winner. It is true, there are more Androids out there. But I begin to wonder how relevant that is, because this is a platform battle, not an adoption battle.

Winners in platform battles are determined by who has greatest control of what is known as the money-side, which in this case, are application buyers. Report after report has shown that iPhone users – who are all pretty much on a single, unified platform if you check out the infographic – purchase more apps than Android users.

That’s why, despite the stunning sales success of Android overall, I think it will likely lose in the long term. It isn’t one platform; even its largest group of customers on one version is tiny compared to iPhone.

And iPhone users pay for apps. They even like doing so.