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Online Community Platforms: A Macro-Overview and Case Study

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At the 2009 ESOMAR Online Research conference, James Kennedy from BrainJuicer presented an overview of his vision of the types of community platforms.

"We are witnessing a shift in corporate behavior from where they get ideas for products and services," said Kennedy. At P&G, success rate for new products climbed from 20% in 2000 to 60% in 2008 as P&G embraced consumer-generated ideas, and P&G expects 50% of products to be from consumer-generated ideas in 2010.

Community and crowdsourcing are two new sources of innovation that organizations need to determine how to make work. It's important to have a clear understanding of goals, who you are engaging with and how you are working with them.

• Branded open communities are a bar; "if you build it, they will come". Some brands have the ability to attract participants to be researched, such as MyStarbucksIdea, which has 75,000 ideas with only 350 ideas implemented. (This represents a lot of new ideas that have been engaged, even though it is only a small percent.)
• Independent open communities are like matchmaking for the B2B world, where people post problems and others post solutions. See NineSigma for an example.
• Branded MROCs are an arranged marriage, where the communities rely on quite close affinities with the brand.
• Multi-client MROCs are what BrainJuicer does with its JuicyBrains innovation community, providing access to 10,000 members across a wide range of categories. The five-phase methodology provides for insight exploration (3 weeks), concept generation (3 weeks), a harvest workshop, a concept clinic (2 weeks) and concept validation. Applications include researching problems, habits, brand associations, test diaries, ideation, concept improvement, claims and positioning, product naming and loyalty ideas.

Using JuicyBrains, Philips Healthcare researched 18 people suffering serious respiratory illness and 5 relatives of such people, asking each to document diagnosis, symptoms and treatment. This study was private and not accessible to other members of the community. Philips Healthcare drew functional insights as well as emotional context, and learnt the importance of better framing how information was presented to patients. Based on the results, Philips is investigating how it can better inform patients about the innovation process.