The 3 Do’s For You in Managing Open Innovation Challenges ?

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We’ve all heard the adage, “There’s no I in team.” and we understand what that statement means. You can’t get there alone and everything is truly a team effort. As true as truisms get, there is good reason we’ve been hearing this since we were kids. Furthermore, this saying carries over quite nicely into this new era of global platforms and communities such as TopCoder that are helping enterprises accelerate innovation and boost productivity via Open Innovation practices.

Accessing specialized talent via open challenges and competitions only bolsters the point further that in today’s business environment, you just can’t go it alone. With all this said, there is a misnomer regarding the level of participation and management techniques required to get the very most out of an Open Innovation engagement. There may be no I in team, but there is most definitely an I in Open Innovation, and it’s you.

We discussed in a recent blog post 3 Tips On Communicating with an Open Innovation Community and we suggest you read that article as a nice base for the following Do’s of managing challenges, competitions, and an entire Open Innovation strategy.

The 3 Do’s For You in Open Innovation

There are 3 key “Do’s” to master when it comes to effectively managing Open Innovation challenges and projects, they are:

In Community YOU Trust

This is a macro “do” within management of individual Open Innovation challenges. Whether you call your knowledge and innovation source a community, a crowd, your fan-base, or something in between, it is of huge importance that you trust this source.

At TopCoder, trust is earned. It’s not a fluffy feel-good euphoria, but rather a metric driven predictability that bolsters your trust in community. Of course, trust is also formed over time by consistent performance from the members who comprise your community.

If you can’t trust your source and your platform to deliver you results, then you will struggle letting go and your productivity will suffer greatly.

Learn to Let Go

Once trust is established, it’s time to learn to let go. This does not mean you do nothing, but this does mean you do things wildly differently. You are not meant to dive into the mosh-pit of Open Innovation, meaning you are not someone producing the work, or the code, or the solution, but rather you must purposefully step outside the sphere where the actual work is getting done and concentrate on the factors that help the community perform. Instead of being the solver, you must be the great facilitator. Concentrate on communicating exceptionally, providing the community access to any data and expertise they will need, and beyond. Do these things remarkably well, trust your community and let go of what you traditionally viewed as your work.