Into The Open/Mobilizing Crowd Intelligence to Source Disruptive Innovations at Robert Bosch GmbH

Abstract

The ‘Stats’ page on Kickstarter.com claims a total of $1,221,791,199 pledged to 65,673 successfully funded projects by 6,613,502 supporters as of today (July 18th, 2014). The tenets of web 2.0 and crowd-based innovation platforms are enabling ordinary but motivated user-innovators to create and own disruptive innovations. This is also pushing industry leaders like Bosch to involve the crowd in an overall value chain of open and collaborative innovation. These developments are transforming the global innovation landscape. This graduation project explores strategies for mobilizing crowd intelligence to source actionable solutions for innovation challenges within Bosch. Conducted with the central User Experience team of Bosch, it begins with a phase of literature research that dives deep into the crowdsourcing phenomenon and an organizational perspective on it. It results in the confirmation of 5 key stakeholders (Innovators, Backers, Steering Team, Challenge Owners & Bosch) and an initial framework (System map) for a service that seems to fit the Bosch context best. Then follows a phase that focuses on understanding the Bosch context by researching two aspects that are foundational to the project’s context – innovation management within Bosch, and the needs and constraints of internal Bosch stakeholders (Challenge Owners). Exploratory design research with the Challenge Owners reveals insights that help choose specific types of innovation challenges within Bosch and target groups (Innovators, Backers) that the platform should target. This results in a concept direction that narrows the focus of the platform to sourcing disruptive solutions to challenges in new business/market/product development preferably in the Business-to-Consumer domain from external inventors and users. From here on, the focus of the project shifts to identifying the right mix of incentives that the platform must offer to motivate the external target groups (Innovators, Backers) to participate. In a phase of conceptualization, all findings and learnings from previous stages of research are consolidated to create four front-end scenarios for the platform, each offering a different mix of motivations and incentives with calculated shortcomings. These scenarios (service prototypes) serve as early-stage concepts which are tested with the external target groups to elicit a plethora of insights. These insights help shape the final service concept in the form of an ideal front-end scenario for the platform. The final concept is labeled ‘Enabled by Bosch’ or ‘Ebb’. Ebb sources actionable design solutions and their validation from inventors and supporters around the globe by offering them a fetching mix of extrinsic and intrinsic incentives. It creates an engaging experience by introducing inspiring innovation domains, offering a true meritocracy and employing tactics of social gamification that draw the target groups. As the name suggests, it leverages Bosch’s immense industrial expertise in product realization to enable inventions through all stages of the new product development process, hence differentiating itself from all other crowd-based innovation platforms that offer inventors just an initial incubatory boost. Most importantly, Ebb strengthens Bosch’s B2C foothold by projecting it as a revolutionary, future-oriented and consumer-driven brand. This concept is complemented with a detailed service blueprint that identifies and details all potential back-end functions and processes integral to the service. This involves all potential actions that the 5 stakeholders perform at various stages to facilitate the service. Keeping in mind that Ebb is a multi-sided platform that has to attract distinct and interdependent target groups of users simultaneously to create value, a business model is proposed. To conclude the conceptualization phase, the Ebb concept is tested with an external target group (Innovators, Backers) to identify weak points and generate recommendations for improvement. Lastly, an implementation plan is proposed keeping Bosch organizational factors in mind and recommendations for implementation and improvement are made. The hope is to offer a good starting point and impetus to pitch the concept to the decision makers and kick-start the implementation of Ebb.