For many organizations, the creation of products and services is how value is created. A number of parts of this process can benefit from Mass Collaboration, as the following section discusses.

Learning from stories told by users

 “…people will surprise [you] by what they ask for.” – Ben Finkel (Fluther.com)

User stories cover needs and requirements, but perhaps more importantly what people would like to do with the product or service. As Von Hippel (Von Hippel, 2005) describes, users of the product or service are ideally positioned to tell the stories of how they have used or would use a product or service or what type of experience they wish to have.  Therefore it seems to make sense that this process can benefit by opening up beyond traditional focus groups or limited research engagements. In his research, Von Hippel noted a number of instances were companies such as General Electric and 3M discovered that these stories came from outside (not from within product teams).

Where good ideas from from

“Innovation comes from where you don’t expect” – Dwayne Spradlin (Innocentive.com)

Unlike user stories, ideas are more specific – they don’t really get to the intent, but rather to a solution to a problem or a new opportunity. Opening up a creative process to solicit more ideas, often results in more ideas – this is not the same as opening up the selection of an idea (i.e. deciding which idea is best), but simply the generation of more, different ideas. Mass Collaboration can help to increase diversity or simply the volume of ideas – often a stated desired outcome for this process step.

Feedback and prioritization

“Every organization big and small suffers from the inhalation of its own smoke.” – David Camp (Spinspotter.com)

Once products or services are “in the wild”, the lines blur between might be seen as service and support and new opportunities (for example, how can resolve a recurring service problem?).  The idea of “always in Beta” is intended to get more frequent feedback by giving access to products and services before they are “finished” – more specifically, during a period where feedback can more greatly impact a product or service.

In the Cathedral and the Bazaar (Raymond, 2001), the role of feedback is tested and explained exposing this as a key mechanism that allows open source software development process to function and in many cases outperform other development processes. Feedback can encompass not only bugs or incremental changes but larger ideas or use cases from the previous two sections, too. 

Free revealing

Often customers have an idea for a product improvement and move beyond their ideas to realize them implement them. In this case, product teams can get working solutions to problems they might be working on. This is a core part of the free revealing process described by Von Hippel. In free revealing, people share improvement and innovation with other groups of likeminded users – Von Hippel explored this behavior among kite surfing enthusiast who shared techniques that included hardware innovations. This mechanism is also at the heart of open source software development as contributors move beyond ideas and identifying bugs and are invited to develop solutions in the form of new code that may become part of the final software release (different communities have different ways of determining how to select contributions). 

In open innovation (for example, as practiced by P&G), a similar result might be obtained via licensing – one party describes what they need, while another describes a solution that they already have and are prepared to license, to fulfill that need. This is closer to traditional market mechanisms. Whatever the form by which implementations are obtained and ultimately owned, having access to more implementations, like ideas and feedback is possible via Mass Collaboration.