Crowds and the innovitaveness of Social Decision Making

Crowds and the innovitaveness of Social Decision Making

Crowd Dialog Europe gathered the European crowd knowledge yesterday in Helsinki – united in diversity and driven by a common goal: to enable the crowd for a greater good. Prof. Dr. Thomas Peisl invited me to co-present with him in a workshop on predictive crowds and showcase our Fingertip tool as platform to implement predictive crowds in innovation work.

Peisl has extensively studied predictive crowding, and has interesting theories about how to set up well functioning crowds, especially in the SMEs to contribute to innovation. His theories are also strongly applicable to decision making.

Peisl differentiates four types of innovation originating from a discussion with Gary Pisano from HBS. The first isIncremental Innovation, where slight changes are made to an existing product. Second is the case of Radical Innovation, where something profound and new is produced but is still sold and distributed through existing, traditional channels. Thirdly he mentiones the Disruptive Innovation, of something changing the way we make business. Finally comes the Architectural Innovation that changes both the technology and the business model at the same time.

Peisl immediately positioned Fingertip as a truly disruptive innovation, and I of course immediately asked what would make Fingertip an architectonic innovation. He replied with something I was truly happy with. If Fingertips’ decisions and decision making could span not just over your own organization, but also be digitally connected to decisions made with your customers, partners, suppliers and other stakeholders, then he’d categorize Fingertip as an innovation that changes the business and the technology. It felt so good, because it is exactly what Fingertip is already capable of doing.

According to Prof. Dr. Peisl A predictive crowd for an SME consists usually of 6-10 people. What seems relatively clear is that especially in the context of disruptive ideas, purposefully selected expert crowds are considered to be more suitable, than undefined heterogeneous amateur crowds. He also very wisely claims that a crowd can not be easily motivated by monetary terms, but rather social aspects should be emphasized.

As a case study I presented a visionary question, a decision dating a year back, when we were deciding on the vision of the new Fingertip.  In my presentation I showed that it had been a tough nut for us to crack, deciding what Fingertip 2.0 should be like. We decided to crowdsource the innovation challenge to 19 people. We selected number of external domain experts, and people from different departments in our company, from the board, sales, and naturally invited the doers – the developers to participate in the crowd.  Only half of the crowd ended up really contributing with their ideas, practical suggestions and work.

A key lesson for us at Fingertip, which is actually the very essence of social decision making, has been to invite the relevant people to the process. Making sure we invite the right crowd, the right people, with the right roles and expectations early on to the virtual discussion board of Fingertip is elementary for good decision making, quality and outcomes. I believe that decision making benefits from a crowd of more fully engaged people and leads to everyone participating becoming even more enaged.