Stefan Lindegaard

What are the common mistakes or missteps that organizations should avoid as they try to build trust within their innovation networks and communities? It would be great to have a discussion on this so I look forward to your input based on my discussion starter below.

Mindset: We are bigger and better than you. Unfortunately, some companies still have this attitude even when they look into external collaboration opportunities. It does not help so drop it and find each other on equal terms.

Networking culture: Some companies do not understand that a strong innovation culture requires a strong networking culture. There is no networking strategy, no process, no training of the employees and most importantly, the employees are not given the time to develop relationships.

Resources: This ties into the above issue on infrastructure. It takes an investment – especially with regards to allocating the proper time – in...

This is an excerpt from my latest book, Making Open Innovation Work. CLICK THIS LINK FOR A FREE DOWNLOAD!

The reason for creating a networking culture is obvious once you look at the current and future direction of innovation. Let’s start by disposing of the myth of the lone genius – the Thomas Edisons and the Alexander Graham Bells of yesteryear – arriving at a breakthrough innovation on his/her own.

This model wasn’t true then, and even if it were, it simply does not hold true in today’s complex business organizations. Technology and the challenges that must be solved have become so complex that many – perhaps even most – companies can no longer rely solely on their own internal innovation geniuses, no matter how brilliant those...

I often have difficulties presenting hard facts as well as strong cases on how companies use social media for their innovation efforts. Now I just got a big help from Social Semantic, which is a project/organization working to help Danish companies and organizations become world-class at using social media and new technologies.

They are about to release an interesting factbook based on 2757 respondents who shared how they use social media and new technolgies to create value within their companies and organizations.

I was given a sneak preview on the innovation part of the factbook and I found the results to be interesting as well as encouraging. Unfortunately, the factbook is only in Danish, but I translated the below images to give you an idea of how companies see a potential in using social media for innovation efforts.

You can download the factbook (in Danish) ...

This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Social Media: Add Power to Your Innovation Efforts, which is due this fall.

Using social media internally for innovation can help lay the groundwork for taking your initiative to an external audience. The platform of choice for doing this for many businesses is Yammer, a popular social media platform that sets up private, secure enterprise social networks that can be used to drive innovation, especially idea generation/development within their company.

I will be using Yammer as an example throughout this blog post due to it’s popularity and since the advice I put forth work equally well for other kinds of social media tools and services used internally.

It can be fairly easy to recruit people for the Yammer platform. It is, however, much more difficult to keep the users engaged over time. So what kind of engagement drivers work for innovation initiatives on Yammer? I have divided these drivers into...