> The Role of Participation in Innovation

> Innovation is a key way for companies to stay competitive. If a company don't constantly improve them, its services and products risk being replaced by those offered by someone else who isn't so averse to change. As the researchers Victor Sandoval and Henry Samier (of école Centrale Paris and INSTIA Innovation res) observe, “Innovation doesn't happen like it used to. A genius or a group of people doing basic research is not enough to come up with one or several new products”. Innovation requires new forms of organization and new types of workspaces, ones that optimize the development of new ideas and make their implementation valuable. Most observers agree that, in the coming years, innovation will happen at the organizational level. It will focus more on the organizational models that produce goods and services and less on the goods and services themselves. Thus, some of the innovation will be about re-organizing and optimizing innovation processes themselves. One of the organizational innovations might just be the implementation of participation structures.

Effective innovation needs participation. As Tim O'Reilly, an evangelist for open source technologies, writes: “creativity is no longer about which companies have the most visionary executives, but who has the most compelling “architecture of participation”. That is, which companies make it easy, interesting and rewarding for a wide range of contributors to offer ideas, solve problems and improve products”.

Several big corporations have launched internal programs to foster participation. Looking to restructure its hotels and strategy, Accor reviewed ideas from 3200 of its 150,000 employees through Innov@ccor, an internal innovation program. The program, launched in 2001, had a huge response: more than 9,000 ideas submitted, 3,000 were actually used by Accor. Since the late nineties, publications that focus on how to make a company's innovation efforts more inclusive have flourished and other companies, like Renault, have had similar programs for many years. The promise that their ideas will be taken into account is often enough to motivate a company's employees to make their implicit knowledge explicit and participate in innovation efforts. As employees, they have the best knowledge of internal work-flow and the most experience with existing barriers. As long as the culture does not encourage participation, though, solutions for internal problems will rarely emerge internally. And some important ideas are very basic: the idea to switch off TV sets automatically when customers leave their rooms, a change that saves Accor between 600,000 and 1,000,000 euros a year, could have come from anyone.

In big corporations with a long history, this kind of participative optimization requires a specific effort and dedicated programs. These programs can be hard to implement simply because they weren't built into the company's DNA from the start. Start-ups, however, may directly integrate participation structures at every level, rather than trying to insert them later. Not surprisingly, hypios, a company whose business is problem solving (and which wants to transform participative innovation outside its walls), is part of the new breed of companies with what you might call a total participative architecture. New technologies play an essential part in the participation structures of the company: “The concept of the author is out here at hypios. We work on marketing texts together, constantly submit new ideas, and vote on everything from new platform features to t-shirt slogans. We use project management systems like activCollab to split up bigger projects into discrete tasks that different people in the company work on, and we all share our calendars, so everyone has access to everyone else's schedule. It's like that from intern to president”, says Jérémie Bertand, vice-president of hypios.

An outside perspective through broadcasting
There's one thing, however, that internal players can never do for their company: offer an outside perspective. The way things are done within the company tend to become so natural for team members that the possibility of fundamental changes never occurs to them. In fact, expertise in a sector may block fresh thinking.