Social Innovation Software: 6 Success Factors & Statistical Proof

Can technology influence social innovation? Yes it can, according to Alex Pentland, the author of a new book called Social Physics, a fascinating analysis of collaboration in online social networks. Pentland researched behavior of thousands of people and found out what incentives are needed to spur social innovation and what role the software behind it can play. I have paired his research together with our lessons learnt from last years and came up with some success factors.

Social innovation is a process in which people, desires, interests, passions and much more are involved. Social innovation means to me the empowerment of people and their ideas to:

• Identify real needs and problems and create a motivating environment where colleagues and stakeholders can openly share opinions to create solutions to the problems that affect them.
• Offer new channels to collaborate constructively and systematically on bottom-up solution, with the participation of the people, who will actually benefit from it.
• Develop ideas in a rapid-prototyping approach, apply solutions and learn together from the collaborative process and outcome right from the start.
• Be open and consider all potential models to implement such solutions, being them commercial or for non-profit (social business).

Social innovation softwares provide with great opportunities throughout a process. For example, they can work as a blended tool to work on idea generation (ideation) and bring people together to develop ideas for implementation. But is not this a highly social process, so what role does software play in it?

Alex Pentland describes in his book how he looked at collaboration patterns in large social networks of thousands of users. Pentland analysed eToro, a social investment network, where he could clearly see how different participants interacted. They actually intervened into the network and set different incentives and were able to trigger behavioral changes by the participants. Over time he found different incentives that led to higher collaboration and better results (investments decisions) for members. This improved the idea flow and let to some success factors for social innovation software.

So what are the decisive points that software should provide? And what organizers and moderators of online social innovation should have at hand?

1. Peer activity as a motivator

One of the biggest motivators in social networks are the activities of your peer. Peers can trigger action – the closer they are to you, the more you are willing to participate. Therefore, it is important to be able to follow your peer activities easily. The closer the peers, the greater the role model. A good way for this is to be well connected in social networks and have an overview on your peers’ activities. But it must be less about quantity – how many contributions are often shown in popular leaderboards; and more about quality – what people share. The Social Physics book is all about that.

2. Email alerts wherever possible

Not all users keep track of their peers’ activities, or they simply may not be well connected on the network. In many cases, the first steps to engage are troublesome because of the time and effort invested in just another network. Email plays here a crucial role to mobilize members, either through weekly digests for “inspiration” or targeted emails from peer activities. The role of activation is also key scheme analyzed by Pentland.

3. Offering various channels

Participants in social innovation processes should be able to collaborate in any possible way, being it commenting directly in the content, or sending private messages to discuss issues further. Different channels should be available since communication behaviors vary a lot between people. We have various metrics on that and will publish a blog post in the future about it.

4. Mobilizing people

Nothing is stronger than an invitation to a process from a peer. One can do as much marketing as possible, but the best with best results is the word of mouth marketing, especially the one coming directly from peers. Friend’s recommendations are the best way to mobilize people. Particularly, because social innovation triggers so much intrinsic motivation, it is best to have the options for user invitations and sharing content all over the place.

5. Innovation happens everywhere

The great thing about social innovation software nowadays is that it is asynchronous and it can be accessed from anywhere at anytime. If someone has a contribution to make and wants to share it right away, this must be made possible from any device. Facebook gets 50% of its traffic from mobile phones, but unfortunately, not all applications are ready for mobile usage yet.

6. Easy and simple social innovation software

Technology needs to be absolute trivial, easy and simple, so there are no hurdles. If you even have a small number of people asking about how idea creation works, then you have a problem. All essential pieces of the software should work without any obstacles and with no documentation and help required. If they do not work intuitively, they hamper collaboration. Easy to say, but still, only a few have achieved it.