Very interesting point of view on Harvard Publishing’s blog from Scott D. Anthony President of Innosight, an innovation consulting and investing company: experts are experts. They know so much that sometimes they..don’t know how customers are using the product they have designed. As Scott pointed out, one should also rely on customer feedback and bottom up innovation to help overcome overexpertise. Rely on your experts knowledge…and the one of your customers.

In the last months we’ve seen an explosion of Yammer or CubeTree usage. Looking at how employees are leveraging these tools to spread knowledge and exchange ideas, one can bet that these services are a very good infrastructure for tapping into collective intelligence. Still looking for real cases where they boosted innovation, but I bet they are part of the tools we needed to foster bottom up innovation.

“a serendipitous discovery is one made by fortunate accident in the presence of sagacity”

Alan G. Robinson, Sam Stern
in Corporate Creativity: How Innovation and Improvement Actually Happen

Capturing ideas where they occur is one of the key for a successfull bottom-up innovation process.  Nowadays, work of many workers  is full of very different activities: Go to meetings, produce reports, interact with other employees at the cofee machines, handle requests from customers, read reports, gather materials, prepare slideshows…

Most of workers are doing more and more.  Sometimes in one activity or another, they will have an idea to improve one process, make customer happier or buy more. This idea can come “by accident”, just because the customer, other employees or the situation make them happen. One must catch these ideas, where they are, when the occurs. So your bottom up innovation tool (Idea Management System, wiki, intranets,…) must be accessible anywhere, anytime, any media: from employees smartphone like Blackberry or iPhones, from the LAN, from the Internet, from their messaging software… Capturing 5% more ideas because of ubiquity of your system can help you get one more killing idea. Think about it.