User-Generated Innovation - Nokia does it You Can Too!

Many people think of innovation as occurring when one genius, alone with his or her thoughts, suddenly leaps into the air with an, "A Ha!" and heads down the path to success. Most of those of us involved with innovation know that this is rarely the case.

In truth, innovation, as we mention in our book, happens in lots of different ways. Though coming up with a unique idea in that "light bulb" moment is the romanticized idea held of innovation, in fact, most good ideas and many of the great ones, result from obtaining input from a variety of different sources, including consumers.

Soliciting and then acting upon user input can not only produce new ideas it can make good ideas great ones. At Nokia, an experiment with opening up a new application, Sports Tracker, for user input turned into a whole new way of streamlining the product development process for the Finnish cell phone maker.

Sports Tracker, designed to benefit runners and cyclist, allowing them to use Nokia phones' GPS capability to capture workout data was downloaded by over one million users when a beta version was posted on Nokia's web site. What surprised Nokia and led to a new way of thinking about the innovation process was the sheer variety of people who downloaded the software - from paragliders to balloonists - and how they used it. Users, it turned out found hundreds of different uses for the software, uses well beyond those the developers had considered.

As a result, Nokia developers are realizing that aiming the application at amateur athletes was too narrow. They are thinking of rebranding the application as a kind of life-tracker.

Since Nokia launched their Beta Labs site, where Sports Tracker was featured as the first application, Tom Vilkarmo, manager of Nokia Beta Labs has a happy problem - managing all of the feedback generated by the over 1 million page views the site garners each month.

But, to Vlkarmo, his managing all of that feedback adds one more step to the process of getting consumer feedback to the software developers. Though he currently blogs about Nokia's new products,

Vilkamo's plan is to turn blogging responsibility over to software developers, so they have direct contact with customers. "Before, there were too many middlemen between developers and users," he says.

This is just one example of a company harnessing the power of the internet to create community, drive innovation and provide direct support to those responsible for innovation. While it's not uncommon for software companies to solicit key users or developers for beta testing, Nokia's strategy of encouraging anyone with an interest in the product, which, incidentally tends to be heavy users, led to more creative thinking, created a community of users and is currently breeding even more new product ideas.

An inventor sitting alone in a room or even discussing new ideas with like-minded colleagues is at a disadvantage when a whole world of ideas is just a mouse click away. Rather than worrying about theft of a good idea, true innovators should worry more about missing the great idea that soliciting user input can reveal.