Crowdsourcing Innovation? Why Not!

Why is it that many great business ideas remain un-utilized? 

One reason is that company managers rarely ask people to come up with great ideas. Instead, companies, and the people that manage them, share a tendency to keep problems to themselves.  Many great ideas never see the light of day simply because organizations don’t ask for help from the very people that are often best able to offer help: their own employees.

While not new, there is a growing effort by companies to use processes and tools that harvest the smart ideas lying dormant among their own employees.  Some call this Intra-organizational Innovation Crowdsourcing.  Or, crowdsourcing within the company that taps into its employees to uncover the smart ideas. 

Crowdsourcing itself, described as the act of outsourcing tasks to a large group of people or community through an open call is well documented. Its uses include tapping the wisdom of the crowd for new technology development, design, or the capture and analysis of large amounts of data.  It is typically enabled through the use of Web 2.0 technologies.

Intra-organizational Innovation Crowdsourcing, or IIC, focuses on encouraging the participation of a company's employees toward contributing great ideas that normally would have remained uncovered.  How are companies using IIC?  Here are just a few examples:

• A California-based solar company runs multiple employee contests annually, each with a $500 prize, for smart ideas. Employees are also rated, and compensated, on innovation in their annual reviews
• A research company involves its employees in a contest titled 100 Days of Innovation; employees are urged to come up with a total of 100 innovative ideas by year's end in order to each receive a monetary reward
• A software company holds a new product naming contest open to all of its employees across all functions, not simply marketing or sales, with the best three submissions winning a monetary reward and the knowledge company-wide that the company's product name originated from employee X
• Daimler’s Open Innovation Network allows the manufacturer of Mercedes-Benz to creatively engage with its own employees to harvest creative ideas that lead to new products, services or technologies

And, what of government?  Yes, even historically un-creative government organizations are getting into the act:

• The U.S. Veterans Administration (VA) introduced its flagship VA Innovation Initiative to create an ongoing competition among its employees for the submission of smart ideas.  Examples of VA employee innovation include 45,000 employees submitting 6,500 ideas to improve health IT systems; and 7,000 employees submitting 3,000 ideas on how to improve benefit claims processing

Intra-organizational Innovation Crowdsourcing's time has come.

Is Water the New Oil?

Is water the new oil?  Maybe... a strong maybe.  There is a growing belief by many that water is fast becoming the kind of precious commodity that oil became in the 20th century.  Consider these statistics:

• People can live as much as 30 days without food but only seven without water
• A billion people lack access to clean water
• 2.5 billion people are without water for sanitation
• 80% of all disease is borne by dirty water

Ironically, when seen from space, earth appears literally as a blue planet, covered by water.  However, the vast majority of that blue is salty or dirty.  Humans need fresh and clean water.

So, is clean water decreasing?  The answer according to environmentalists, is YES.  The cause, not surprisingly, is the intersection of a growing human population and a warming world.

According to Jonathan Greenblatt, a professor at UCLA who advised the Obama administration: "As climate change accelerates and we see a changing hydrological cycle, diminishing access to resources, there are direct human impacts that are water-related."

There is a real danger that if sea levels rise dramatically due to global warming as scientists predict, coastal regions may see increased salination of aquifers -- natural underground reservoirs -- which will further affect access to fresh water.  In addition, in some areas such as central China, global warming is causing rapid desertification directly outside Beijing, with desert-like conditions coming to areas that were once fertile.  The result is further stress on fresh, clean and available water.

And, what of the economic relationship between an investment in clear water projects and its return to government and business?  Consider:

• The World Health Organization reports that:
• every $1 spent on water and sanitation can bring economic benefits ranging from $7 - $12
• healthcare agencies could save $7 billion a year
• employers could gain 320 million productive days a year for workers in the 15-to-59 age range
• there could be an extra 272 million school attendance days annually
• an added 1.5 billion healthy days for children under the age of five 
• The Natural Resources Defense Council says that an investment of $11.3 billion a year could yield a payback of $83 billion a year in increased productivity and health

So, is water the new oil?  Perhaps the answer lies in considering these two questions: How long can a person live without oil?  How long can a person live without water?

 * Source: 2009 World Water Forum in Turkey

Reminder: How Earth’s Temperature is Changing

What's important:  the last decade was the warmest on record for over a century of global atmospheric and oceanic temperatures and each of the 10 warmest years recorded since 1880 have occurred in the last fifteen years.

So, drawing a comparison, how does human activity resulting in greenhouse gas emissions and global warming compare to the emission of volcanoes and the energy of nuclear warheads?

Comparing Global Warming to Volcanoes:

Human activity is by far the largest contributor to the observed increase in atmospheric CO2. Global CO2 levels have risen from 280 ppm prior to the Industrial Revolution to over 390 ppm today. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, human CO2 emissions amount to about 30 billion tons annually—more than 130 times as much as volcanoes produce each year. A case in point, In 1991 Mt. Pinatubo, one of the largest volcanic eruptions of the 20th century was estimated to have emitted 42 million tonnes of CO2. Globally, according to the US Energy Information Administration, human activity contributed 29,195 million tonnes of CO2 to the air in just 2006 alone- nearly 700 times as much as the Pinatubo volcanic eruption.

Comparing Global Warming to Nuclear Warheads:

A portion of the incoming solar radiation from the sun is trapped by greenhouse gases (ie, CO2, CH4, etc) in the earth’s atmosphere and the resulting heat energy absorbed by the oceans constitutes 80-90% of the total heat energy in the earth’s overall climatic system. The upper layers in the global oceans have warmed considerably over the last 15 years and the 2010 hurricane outlook is a dire reflection of this; the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) forecasted an “active to extremely active” hurricane season for 2010. The NOAA projected a 70 percent probability for 14 to 23 named storms, 8 to 14 hurricanes, and 3 to 7 major hurricanes. According to an oceanography study at the University of Hawaii's Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, between 1993 and 2008 the upper 700 meters of the earth’s oceans absorbed about 0.6 watts per square meter of energy. That is nearly equivalent to the energy of 2 billion copies of the nuclear bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima during World War II.

The change in earth's temperature is important.

Sources:

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/jan/HQ_10-017_Warmest_temps.html
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100615_globalstats_sup.html
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2009/20090916_globalstats.html
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=seven-answers-to-climate-contrarian-nonsense
http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2010/04/16//2874939.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2010/05/20/20climatewire-robot-floats-record-sharp-increase-in-upper-67924.html