Collaborative innovation as a sustainable process

A challenging economic environment, rapidly changing customer preferences and a strong competitive pressure: those are the factors forcing companies to embed innovation in their DNA. CogniStreamer helps them facilitating this process with a collaborative innovation software platform and innovation services.

Collaborative innovation

Motivated people who share a vision, need the appropriate technology to collaborate on innovation through the exchange of ideas, information and work. Innovation can occur spontaneously, but that takes time. The innovation process gets a real boost if you focus on it, and to achieve this focus CogniStreamer first studied which human interactions lead to innovation. Next, we went looking for technology that facilitates these interactions. As internet and social media offer great tools to deepen and expand collaboration, the CogniStreamer software platform has been developed based on these insights.

Incremental vs. disruptive: a different approach

Incremental innovation is about making things better, whereas disruptive innovation focuses on making better things. If your company only bets on incremental innovation, your competitors will catch up and leave you behind in the long run. So, at some point you’ll have to step outside your comfort zone to discover disruptive innovation. But this can be quite tough, as these are very different processes.
 So how does CogniStreamer facilitate both incremental and disruptive innovation? Innovation is about connecting knowledge, and that knowledge is inside people’s heads, therefore you must ensure that different ideas can intersect in a structured way. As an example, our software makes it possible to launch a challenge in which all staff input is sought on a specific problem or a question. If you challenge your employees with an incremental innovation to come up with, you’ll fairly quickly get a number of concrete ideas, just because you work within their comfort zone. But when it comes to disruptive innovation, you’ll have to proceed more cautiously, for example by asking for insights first. This way you’ll get answers like “Look at this website, listen to that professor, or read these papers.” Over time, fragments of ideas on those insights will emerge, which we call ‘sparks’. If all is well, these sparks stick together into useful concepts. This process can take a long time, and really should be cherished, if you want it to be successful.

Measuring the success of the collaborative innovation process

CogniStreamer monitors exactly what innovation is at what stage, how much input there is, what is the quality of the input, who is participating and to which extent, how many positive or negative feedback there is. This monitoring activity allows you to provide the right incentives at the right time, to give innovation more oxygen, or even stop certain initiatives. From experience with our customers we learned that these measures are very useful as performance indicators. Thanks to those indicators we can make innovation a continuous process. And that’s what it is about: the sustainability of innovation as a process.