The customer - idea supplier No. 1

Now you can occasionally look on one or the other website to see what is written about your own products or those of your competitors. And if there are good ideas there, they can be included in the idea management. And then one hopes that occasionally product innovations will develop from this that can be successfully marketed.

Quite honestly, this has little to do with a systematic process that should contribute to the efficient further development of idea management. Similar to many other topics in the company, this is in fact a matter of

Systematic transformation process

a transformation process that affects many aspects and in which it is necessary to consider all the important issues in order to ensure successful implementation.

In order to do this systematically, the consulting and project company TCI Transformation Consulting International has developed a process model from the experience of numerous transformation projects, which has been used successfully in many such projects (Figure 1).

Implementation of social media use

What does this mean when applied to the use of social media for idea management? Each of the headings in chart 1 must be worked through and answered in relation to the necessary transformation - some topics in more detail, others less deeply, depending on the need and implementation.

Positioning, strategy and business model

The innovation strategy should be closely aligned with the corporate strategy. This is a basic prerequisite for any targeted and successful innovation. Of course, this also includes the strategy of how the company comes up with new ideas and how these are evaluated (keyword: stagegate process). This means that the generation of ideas via social media has a direct influence on the innovation strategy and thus also indirectly on the corporate strategy. Thus, the following questions in particular need to be answered:

• In which topics are impulses expected from customers, but also from competitors, where do you want to let them have their say?
• For which products does the integration of social media make sense at all?
• Which topics should be communicated in general and which strategically important topics should rather be kept secret until the end in order not to draw the competitor's attention to them at an early stage? Or doesn't absolute transparency lead to cooperation that opens up potential added value in the first place?

Value-added process model

The generation of ideas via social media and the World Wide Web intervenes directly in the process landscape. The occasional review of a few pages on the Internet cannot be the goal of this transformation. Rather, it is a matter of integrating these resources into the corporate processes in a targeted and efficient manner in order to ensure that useful and profitable results compensate for the effort involved.

Again, it is important to consistently work through a few items:

• What does it mean when the innovation process is carried out by customers and not, as is usual in medium-sized companies, by engineers?
• Are market studies, cooperations with universities and other research institutions still needed or how do these activities change? 
• Can the costs of innovation management be reduced or eliminated altogether?
• What else is needed to generate, evaluate and implement ideas in a meaningful way? Or does nothing change here through the use of social media?

Roles and responsibilities

If the customer now provides the ideas directly, this has an influence on the roles and responsibilities in the company. This must be taken into account and wanted, because otherwise, for a variety of reasons, these ideas will not be accepted (keyword: "not-inventedhere syndrome"). So if the innovation manager perceives these ideas "from outside" as a threat to his job, he may do everything he can to ensure that these ideas are not successfully implemented.

Consequently, roles and responsibilities change and need to be adapted:

• What needs to be clarified is what is fundamentally changing.
• What is (still) the function of the innovation manager or the product manager? The effects do not necessarily have to be negative, but they should be described.
• How important is the company suggestion scheme still?
• Or is the social media manager now becoming the product manager?
• And will there be new roles, for example the knowledge worker?
• What is the patent procedure?

Optimized organizational structure

As already mentioned, transformations naturally also have an impact on the organizational structure and processes in the company. New roles and responsibilities emerge and these must be mapped in the organizational structure so that there are no competence disputes and other frictional losses. Only then can the ideas gained be promptly implemented in hopefully lucrative innovations.

Questions to be answered in this context:

• Where are the social media activities located in the company? In marketing or sales? In

Reduce expenses or save them altogether

in production, in innovation management? With HR management or directly with the board of directors? What status will they have?

• What will the call center of tomorrow look like? Will only orders and complaints continue to be received here, or will ideas and suggestions for improvements and new products also be accepted?
• Is social media monitoring becoming a central element of idea management?
• Do more staff need to be deployed here? And can this be saved in other places?
• What does this mean for product lifecycle management?

Skills and personnel

Innovation processes are to a large extent communication processes. Social media redefines communication and therefore influences the necessary requirements for personnel. While it was still common at the end of the 90s for developments in companies to cause astonishment and pats on the back in the private sphere, it is now the other way round.

Today, digital natives define the requirements for communication in the company with their experiences from the private sphere. Therefore, the job profiles will also change. Dealing with and moving in the social network has to be learned. And the information has to be interpreted. Here, the most important person is also not the one who places the most orders, but the one who writes the most posts (tweets) and receives the most replies (re-tweets) to them. This must be taken into account.

This means that staff will have to be developed or new staff will have to be recruited: 

• How many employees and with which skills are needed for the tasks? How do job profiles have to be adapted or newly created?
• What is already available? What is still missing? (Keyword: Competence plan process)
• What are the appropriate and necessary measures to further develop existing employees or to introduce new employees to the tasks efficiently and quickly? 
• What target agreements are concluded with these employees, what do you want to measure them against?

Supporting methods and information systems

As we all know, the Internet is full of information and the difficulty is not that nothing is found, but that too much information is found. So, on the one hand, it must be clarified where to search for the relevant information, and on the other hand, how this information is evaluated and processed. For the latter, many tools already exist on the market, but here, too, the right one must be chosen.

Decisions have to be made here as well:

• Where to look for information: is it only the classi

Learning to move on the Social Net

classic social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and Co., or also the rating portals such as Ciao. de, the shopping portals such as Amazon. de and the online presences of trade magazines such as Chip.de and others, where people discuss products and services in the same way?

• Should a corporate blog be initiated in which customers, but also non-customers, can leave and evaluate their ideas? Or do you join existing idea portals?
• What are the requirements for an evaluation and processing tool and which one is suitable for the company? Which ones are the right ones for the company's needs and how much effort should be invested?
• How is policy made with social media tools in the company? 85 percent of knowledge workers first look at the www, although the intranet can often already provide impetus.

Controlling and Governance

As with any transformation, it must be clarified whether all the effort is worthwhile and whether the associated goals will be achieved. It must also be determined who is allowed to place something in social media and which approval processes must be adhered to. How do you deal with customer criticism of your own products and services, whether justified or not? Is this criticism just taken note of, or are appropriate communications used to comment on what is actually expected from customers? Or does the opinion still prevail in the company that such criticism should be countered with legal steps?

Questions that should be answered on this:

•  What goals are associated with idea generation via social media? What does the company want to achieve with it? 
• Are there suitable KPIs to calculate an ROI? Which effects arise at all and are they all intentional?
• Are there discontinuation criteria? When should the activities not be pursued further or what are the indications for a discontinuation?

What is expected from the customer?

kators for adjustments and improvements? (Keyword: risk and opportunity management)

• Is there a corporate policy on the subject of publications on the Internet and does it need to be adapted? How are infringements dealt with?
• Is there a contingency plan for a so-called "shit storm"?

These are all topics and issues that should be considered, although the list is certainly not exhaustive, but only considers the essential issues.

Summary

In recent years, social media has radically changed the communication needs of an entire generation. This change offers the opportunity to use this type of communication for companies and their innovation processes. The holistic view presented here is the basis for a necessary transformation process, especially in idea management. Figure 2 summarizes our approach to the Transformation Social Media Cycle for idea management.