The Important Role of Collaborative Questioning in Open Innovation

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Asking questions, attaining answers; it’s a very human thing to do. The very notion of Q&A has spawned some of the most valuable social networking sites we have today including Reddit and their popular AMA (Ask Me Anything) “sessions” and of course Quora, which is a social network based wholly on people asking questions and subject matter experts selecting to offer up their time to answer the questions in what is a “social” environment. The knowledge share that takes place on these sites can be impressive and in Open Innovation communities, this knowledge share can be crucial to the overall success of any project, challenge or campaign. So how can you foster valuable Q&A within your own community or effectively set up purposeful Q&A for your Open Innovation initiatives? You’ve got to open things up, of course. But there is also a very important role your internal players will assist with. 

Related Read: How Quora Founder and Ex-Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo Became a TopCoder

The Role of Collaborative Questioning in Open Innovation  

Collaborative questioning, it sounds like a fancy term, but in reality it’s an exercise that you can execute repeatedly. It is simply the practice of hosting a lively Q&A (in a tech setting that supports multiple virtual users) prior to your Open Innovation or Crowdsourcing project going live. The key to the discussion is in allowing the people who are asking the questions (in this case the community) to see all the questions being asked and gain the value of hearing the answers to all of the questions. 
When domain expertise is being shared via an open forum session on the TopCoder platform, each participant has the advantage of hearing answers to questions they themselves may never have thought to ask. Collaboratively, the community asks scores of questions, and as a whole, “better” questions. Individually, they benefit from the answers and knowledge transfer taking place and that can often help them create a better solution for the client. That, in a nutshell, is collaborative questioning and it is a practice you can adopt and repeat for your Open Innovation initiatives. 
Here are 4 steps you can take to set up collaborative questioning properly:

Step 1 - Identify Your Internal Experts Early
Identify your internal subject matter experts who can help with the specific project at hand. You probably already know who they are, and of course, depending on the challenge or contest, this person(s) is likely to change. Early on, as you identify this project as a good fit for Open Innovation, bring your subject matter experts into the discussion and alert them that their participation in this specific challenge is being requested. Have a clear way to communicate to them (your internal experts) what their role is, how you need their support, how much scheduled time will likely be needed, and the importance of their role as well as the overall importance of attaining a successful output from the challenge. You are asking someone for their time and you already know (likely first-hand) just how busy they are. Communicate early on why you need them for this unique and important role.

Step 2 – Schedule the Collaborative Questioning Session
Working with your community platform provider, find a day and time that will likely draw a high level of participation from the community you are working with. Keep in mind, many creative and innovation communities are quite global, TopCoder for instance has members in over 200 countries from around the world. So, depending on the discipline and specialized skill you will want competing on this project or contest for you, schedule your session at a time that hopefully best fits your audience. Perhaps this means a late night for you and your small team, but the vibrant session will prove worth it. Get the date on the books and work with your community platform provider (that would be TopCoder or an innovation platform as such) to help socialize the word community-wide that this important Q&A will be taking place in order to support a very specific upcoming challenge or contest. 

Step 3 – Execute a Purposeful Q&A Session
Go in understanding macro themes you know you will need to cover and micro-details you believe should be shared. Provide documentation (intra-community) on the web where the community member can access prior to the Q&A as to familiarize themselves with these macro themes, your objectives and more. Prep the community so they have a nice base of knowledge heading into this Q&A so that the forum time isn’t spent on the vague or readily accessible. You want to foster natural “rabbit holes” that will allow your subject matter expert(s) to share high-levels of detail with the entire audience on very specific subjects they are bringing up in this collaborative session. The community will ask very detailed and intriguing questions, so be on your game!

Step 4 – Document the Session
This is simple. If you can, document the session and provide a transcript to the community so they can go back to this Q&A banter later on if they so choose to do so. It can help them recall a specific detail that ultimately helps them create a better solution for you. 

Sometimes, “simple” things are a bit more nuanced than what appears on the surface and repeatedly executing purposeful Q&A sessions is likely one of those “things”. Remember the keys: Have your subject matter experts in place, foster collaborative questioning, and help steer the discussion towards the appropriate level of detail so the community members have access to specific detail and knowledge that can really help them create better assets for you

Collaboratively Creating an iPad Application for NASA Astronauts

Call it Crowdsourcing, call it co-creation, or just call it plain cool. The TopCoder Community is embarking on a very creative endeavor to design, develop, and produce an iPad app that will help NASA astronauts more seamlessly and accurately track their dietary intake while living aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Throw into the mix some very unique technical variables, such as this new iPad application will not be connected to the Internet, and we’ve got a sincerely interesting challenge on our hands.
The official name for this newest Open Innovation project is the NASA Tournament Lab ISS-FIT (Food Intake Tracker) Challenge and the first contests helping to comprise this overall challenge, a voice command idea generation contest and a conceptualization contest have just been launched. Follow those links to learn more about the individual contests and to register to compete. 
These competitions are the latest in an ISS focused series of challenges running on the NASA Tournament Lab (NTL) which is powered by TopCoder and is in partnership with Harvard Business School. To help kick-off this particular challenge NASA was kind enough to arrange a Skype video sit down between TopCoder and NASA Astronaut Dr. Donald Pettit and that interview is just below for your enjoyment. Dr. Pettit has logged more than 370 days in space and has lived on the ISS for a total of 13 months. So to say we sat down with a subject matter expert would be putting it mildly! 

Understanding our readers  and community members are busy, we created this helpful video legend. We of course encourage you to watch the interview in its entirety, but if you wanted to focus on Dr. Pettit discussing potential new user experiences for the forthcoming iPad application, that section begins at approximately 12:13 – Thank you. 

 

Enjoy the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bmWQRFVSf-8

 

 

Sincere thanks are owed to the team from NASA who helped arrange the interview and of course to Dr. Pettit who was gracious in every manner. We look forward to tracking what the TopCoder community will create and hope it benefits the astronauts performing  incredible science aboard the ISS for many “moons” to come.

2013: The Year of the Sensor – Your Year to Innovate in the Physical Realm

The One Word Answer

“Sensors…” It was the one word start of an answer he gave as he reached into his pocket for his mobile device. Sitting in a conference room at the start-up incubator – LaunchBox Digital located in D.C. – I remember thinking, he reminds me of “House M.D.” minus the cane, and nicer. The question he began to answer was a simple one: “What’s the next big thing in technology?”
The date was Summer 2009 and the answer was delivered by Tim O’Reilly.
It hit the room and resonated in such a way that it reminded us of another very famous one word answer – enjoy this iconic clip from 1967 Dustin Hoffman classic, “the Graduate”.
Tim continued, fumbling a bit to get his phone in hand and went on to delicately describe the sensors he was now holding, what these fairly limited sensors were measuring and providing for him in real time and how these sensors (and many, smaller and highly sophisticated ones) were about to permeate every piece of our public life. From the clothes we wear, to the packaging holding the food we will consume, to the streetlights we cross under, the world was about to receive a new layer of “skin”. A digital layer where data was generated, collected, and manipulated by tiny sensors… and now, it is coming to pass. It seems 2013 is the year of the sensor. If resistance is indeed futile, then how can you out innovate your competition and gain competitive advantages in this collective “Borg” that is the emerging 3.0?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PSxihhBzCjk#t=0s

 

It does not matter if you call this sensor-laden future (and in many ways, our sensor laden present) the 3.0, the Industrial Internet, the Internet of Things, the era of the Quantified Self, the era of Big Data or all of the above! The reality is simple. Technology is moving into physical “things” at an incredible pace and because of this, new opportunities to innovate in the physical realm are re-emerging. This new convergence of data, sensor technologies and your ability to create innovative interfaces successfully blending the digital and physical worlds is your opportunity to succeed and out innovate your competition in 2013.
Need some inspiration to get going? Here’s just a few articles from the last 2 weeks that showcase some brazen innovations happening in this new frontier of the blended digital-physical realm. 
Sensor Equipped Snowboards Teach You How to Carve the Slopes 
Cruise Control App Changes Music Based on the Pace of Your Run - What a simple way to create a new experience for these users.

Energy Harvesting on the ISS: NASA’s Newest Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing Challenge

“Space… the final frontier.” For many sci-fi fans – myself included in the geek-dom –  that iconic opening line from Star Trek speaks to the vast openness of both the physicality of space and the opportunities that lay ahead for us humans. As we continue to explore and experiment in space, a newer technique for innovating continues to emerge and evolve here on Earth. Open Innovation challenges focused on solving or improving rather complex mathematical solutions is finding great and repeated success in this format utilizing a community of competitors. Each new Open Innovation challenge represents one small step for man, and one giant leap for innovation kind.

NASA is one of the pioneers in this field, consistently leveraging Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing to help their teams solve big, and rather specific challenges. This very complex algorithm challenge is being launched via the NASA Tournament Lab (NTL) an Open Innovation platform powered by TopCoder and in partnership with Harvard Business School.

I very recently had the pleasure to interview William Spetch, a NASA aerospace engineer from their VIPER team – Vehicle Integrated Performance, Environments and Resources – who is heading up a brand new open innovation challenge focused on energy harvesting aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Watch the video below to understand the importance of this Open Innovation challenge, not just for the space station and NASA, but potentially for all of humanity as well. 
We encourage all readers to join or pass along this exciting challenge and here’s an easy way to do so. Below is a short animated video that sums up this exciting algorithmic competition. Please watch and share the contest and if you’d care to register visit www.TopCoder.com/iss right now.
Let’s help NASA power the International Space Station so they can continue to boldly go and so we can truly say; “I’m giving it all she’s got Captain!”