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M e t h o d s a n d to o l s

Many companies try to encourage customer feedback; some even enlist their customers as co-creators. Here are some suggestions for getting the most out of the relationship.

Riley Gibson, Co-Founder and CEO, Napkin Labs

59© 2012 The Design Management Institute

of view, but they also make it easy for designers to open up the design process to consumers beyond the marketing research stage. Online plat-forms enable consumers to become co-creators as they help generate ideas throughout the design process. As a result, the design world is entering a new era of collaborative design.

However, tech is only a sliver of

ethnographic techniques, are unlock-ing a new type of research process that is nimble, iterative, and massively scalable, and can keep up with today’s fast pace of innovation.

The benefits of these new tools are enormous. Not only do they allow designers to quickly and inexpensively tap into a global community filled with diverse perspectives and points

Forming a rich understanding of the consumer is a critical element of the design process. Although ethnog-raphies, focus groups, and surveys have been the mainstay of consumer-insights research, the Internet and social media are driving the creation of an entirely new set of tools for harvesting insights. Online social research tools, paired with traditional

Encouraging Customer Co-creation Online: Why Money Doesn’t Matterby Riley Gibson

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2) Provide feedback.

For co-creation initiatives to be successful, incentives need to appeal to deeper levels of intrinsic motiva-tion. One top intrinsic motivator is what Dan Pink, author of Drive, calls mastery, which is based on the notion that people have an innate desire to learn and become experts at the things they do. To tap into individu-als’ desire for mastery, project orga-

nizers should provide feedback frequently so that individuals can learn and grow. Of course, in addition to providing motivational power, constant feedback can also drive more-focused ideas and results. At Napkin Labs, we encourage companies using our platform

to provide contributors with feedback around submitted ideas on a regular basis. Ontolo, a company that pro-vides search engine optimization and link-building technology, uses our platform to participate in open con-versations with their customers about which features the company should offer next. Ontolo comments on cus-tomers’ ideas regularly and has found that the feedback not only motivates people to continue to contribute, but also helps direct conversations around specific parts of ideas that Ontolo wants to build out further.

it is important to encourage commu-nication and interaction among con-tributors so that they feel they share a common purpose. Online community interaction can take the form of vot-ing, providing comments, and even collaboratively building ideas. In addi-tion to increasing dedication to a proj-ect, community interaction can also boost creative output. As community members are inspired by each other’s

ideas, they are more likely to provide valuable content. For example, Foldit, an online game that allows anyone to help solve scientific problems by completing protein-folding puzzles, encourages contributors to work on puzzles in teams by providing an in-game chat feature. The game’s interactive teams are more successful at folding proteins into their optimal shape than those who go at it alone because team members are able to strategize around how to complete the protein puzzle. They also motivate one another to stay invested.

this new equation. When it comes to fostering successful online re-search and co-creation communities, technology is often not as important as forming innovative and meaningful systems for encouraging participation and collaboration. Normally, incen-tives are thought of as purely mone-tary, but you may be surprised to hear that monetary compensation is not the best way to enhance the overall output within an online co-creation community. Instead, the key to motivating com-munity contributors is to offer a unique variety of incentives that tap into both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators and reward communities for the diverse talents they bring to the table.

So, what’s the secret recipe for a successful incentive system? Here are five rules we at Napkin Labs think about when we build programs for encouraging innovation in co-creation communities.

1) Cultivate an interactive community.

Co-creators become more dedicated to a project when they feel they’re part of a community and are working to-ward a common goal, not when they are treated as subjects of research. In order to foster a sense of community,

Online community interaction can take the form of voting,

providing comments, and even collaboratively building ideas.

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an instant feedback loop, keeping them highly engaged over the five-week research project. As a result, the project run on our platform provided Intuit with much insight into the lives of their target customers.

4) Allow contributors to advance their reputations.

People generally want to build their identity, gain followers, and be seen as thought leaders, so it’s important to appeal to these intrinsic motivators.

Allowing contribu-tors to have an iden-tity helps them feel motivated because they can elevate their reputation as

they contribute valuable content. To go one step further with this, project organizers can reward contributors with rewards that are directly cor-related with the desire for reputation. For example, Electrolux Design Lab, an annual global competition for design students, does this by offering finalists the chance to present their ideas to a panel of business execu-tives and brilliant design minds, often accompanied by a large amount of exposure in the press. While not a monetary reward, Electrolux presents a platform from which its community members can become recognized and

financial software for small busi-nesses and individuals, experienced a significant increase in the number of customer responses to research ques-tions when they used our platform for research about new product offerings. When conducting research without our platform, each research project averaged about 500 customer contri-butions (defined as submitted images, videos, collages, and written answers in response to research questions). How-ever, when using the Napkin Labs

platform, Intuit’s research project re-ceived more than 3,000 contributions, with an average on-site time of nearly 20 minutes per visit. The increase in participation occurred because our platform’s point system encourages community members to increase their point score by participating in the project. Since our algorithm assigns more points to influential contribu-tions, community members not only participated but also delivered quality contributions that sparked further conversation within the community. In addition, the real-time point score provided community members with

3) Incorporate game dynamics.

Game designer Jane McGonigal has done research showing that games have a huge amount of collabora-tive and motivational power because humans are psychologically pre-disposed to enjoy games. Integrat-ing the elements that make games fun—levels, points, challenges, and rewards—can play into the human psyche and increase engagement in the design initiative while driving constructive behaviors. For example, at Napkin Labs, we have created an incentive system that leverages humans’ innate love for playing games. Our team has developed a points algorithm that measures every action within a given community, as well as the influence of those actions, to provide a real-time point score for each individual community member. The result of this point system has been an average time-on-site that is equivalent to that spent on many online games. It has also encour-aged a higher quality of community contributions because members are optimizing their behaviors to maximize points, which are naturally aligned with our project goals.

Intuit, a company that develops

Allowing contributors to have an identity helps them feel motivated because they can elevate their

reputation as they contribute valuable content.

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build their reputations—and this is a highly effective model for encouraging online communities.

5) Reward key contributors.

When encouraging innovation, it’s important to recognize the variety of roles involved in the collaborative process. For example, some people are terrific at synthesizing informa-tion and forming valuable insights; others are amazing at storytelling and sharing pointed observations about their lives; still others are great at helping others build out ideas. When an online design initiative has one creator who arrives at a popular idea, if it rewards only that creator, project organizers will risk alienating valu-

able contributors. Consumers want to feel they have an influence over the process, so recognizing their contri-butions to a project is essential for keeping them engaged. OpenIDEO, an online platform for tackling social innovation projects, accomplishes this by identifying contributors who are most active in each of the three challenge phases (inspiration, concept formation, and evaluation), rather than just a single contributor. In ad-dition, the platform also identifies top collaborators who actively help build out other contributors’ ideas through-out the challenge phases. By breaking rewards and points into multiple categories, OpenIDEO encourages multiple collaborative personas and

has created a richer community than competitions that simply reward top ideas.

With new online tools making it easier for consumers to be involved throughout the design process, de-signers need to learn how to become effective facilitators of innovation for co-creation initiatives. Of course, understanding what motivates in-novation is the key to mastering the facilitator role. Designers who follow the rules for encouraging innova-tion will reap the most benefits from involving consumers in the research and design process online. n Reprint #12231GIB58

by Will Ayres & Scott Lerman