A simple definition of a community is "A group of people with a common goal, interest or interest." That is a rather broad concept. To make it even more concrete, there are many software solutions that offer the capability to build a community. This can vary from blogs, groups (e.g. Linkedin group, Facebook group, Sharepoint workspace, Whatsapp group), collaboration solutions (e.g. Slack and Yammer), social learning software and of course community software (e.g. Lithium).
It is important that people in a community have contact with each other and therefore can share knowledge and experience with each other. A familiar environment where interaction, knowledge and experience sharing have the focus.
Open- and Closed Communities
A closed community means that you consciously have complete control over who gets access to the community. So even with a closed community you can innovate completely outside of your organizational boundaries. So in a closed community, your ecosystem can actively participate and you are therefore perfectly capable of realizing open innovation and co-creation.
In an open community, you make your community available to everyone who wants to contribute to the innovation community. You therefore have less control over the participants. This places more demands on moderators to promote desired behavior. An open community can provide more refreshing dialogues and insights, while quality has to be monitored.
What is an Innovation Community
Communities are powerful tools to get energy from people, to share knowledge and experiences with each other. For an organization that facilitates a community, this provides a wealth of insights on what is extremely valuable. The contribution of a community is difficult to quantify in practice.
If community software has a specific focus domain, then in practice it mainly focused on sales and service. The community's contribution can then be better quantified in practice, resulting in a better substantiated business case with a clear return on investment.
An organization or a network of organizations often have concrete strategic innovation goals, such as the collection, selection and development of solutions that generate x% turnover increase for a specific product portfolio on the basis of a specific innovation issue. Only standard community software is then no longer sufficient.
It requires a controlled innovation process / innovation method that supports the users / innovators on many aspects of innovation. You can think of, among other things, developing various business cases, using models, making insight into the value of ideas in the process (innovation funnel), guiding the innovation process in manageable phases, conducting experiments, receiving feedback from the community and of course the cooperation of innovation teams.
For the above reason, the innovation community has a greater added value for an organization than standard community software, which only fulfills a single aspect of successful innovation and change.
At the heart of our innovation community are not only the ideas or propositions central, but also all stakeholders from your ecosystem where interaction, learning, knowledge sharing and fun are important aspects.
A complete innovation community is set up in which all those involved can actively participate in the innovation process. This applies not only to the innovators, individuals or teams working on an idea / proposition, but also to all involved participants. Their positive critical feedback is valuable to develop propositions that connect to the market on the one hand, but are also supported within the organization and other stakeholders. This will decrease both the time to market of new propositions and increase the chance of success.
Below are briefly a few parts of the Innofication innovation community that are briefly explained.
New ideas can be shared through various channels in the innovation community such as an intranet, website, extranet, social media (eg Twitter), the application itself or another channel. In the innovation community, the ideas can be developed by innovators into fully-fledged propositions. The participants in the innovation community can provide these ideas / propositions with assessments, so that propositions can be further developed with the support of the community.
An innovator has the capability to put together an innovation team for his idea / proposition. The participants in the innovation team can help to further develop the proposition, where they are supported with templates and many models (including popular canvases) that can be elaborated online.
In addition, the innovation team members can participate in a closed collaboration solution where they can share information with each other and hold polls to quickly make decisions within the team. An innovation team member can be any participant / player in the innovation platform. Participants in the innovation community are often referred to as players by Innofication.
In addition, all players in an innovation community can chat with each other in a group chat. The solution also has an internal messaging system to enable each other to send messages quickly. This is even easier than e-mail.
In the innovation community, content can be made available and scheduled to all players from the content management system. This way, content can also be added to the knowledge base. This content can have different forms. The innovation community is made up of different campaign (s) that have different goals. Every campaign in the innovation community can be completely different in terms of innovation process, functionalities, participants, content, language and even design which depends entirely on your innovation issue.
The innovation community has an extensive authorization model where an open or closed community can be set up for each innovation campaign. To confuse you even more, a campaign can even be a combination of an open and closed community that depends on the innovation process.
All capabilities are available to motivate the participants in the innovation community in a natural way to show desired behavior resulting in an active community, entrepreneurial corporate culture, new insights, new ideas, successful propositions and better business results.
