FEEDBACK: A Crucial Step to Your Open Innovation Success

Posted by cbonner on October 14, 2012 @ 9:48 am

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Recently, we shared the article: 3 Do’s For YOU in Managing Open Innovation Challenges and the focus of that article took the adage – There’s No I in Team – and showcased that in Open Innovation, there is most certainly an I, and it just so happens to be you. When you manage Open Innovation challenges you must grow to trust the community you are working with, you must let go of traditional responsibilities and tasks, and you must become the grand conductor of value and outputs so you can instrument multiple competitions in parallel and accomplish more than you have previously thought possible. For more detail on how to master those three “Do’s”, click the aforementioned article above. Consider the addition below a deeper dive into how you provide crucial feedback and at which points in an open innovation challenge to do so in order to help drive amazing deliver-ables from your community.

Jessica Williams of TopCoder originally created the following post for the TopCoder Studio Blog – a community facing blog focused on tips, new design/front-end contests and more. When Jess created this post, it was meant to showcase to the community members how crucial it is for them as designers and innovators to take what we at TopCoder call the Milestone feedback (see graphic to left for definition of Milestone) and use it to improve their submissions.

Jess’s advice to the community members doubles as sound advice for those running open innovation challenges. Providing clear and quality feedback at an iterative stage like a Milestone is a crucial step to success for your competitions and challenges. Please continue on to both read and see one such impressive transformation that was spurred by quality Milestone feedback. We also recommend this article – 3 Tips on Communicating with an Open Innovation Community

Milestone Feedback Keeps You in the Game!

TopCoder Studio has a unique competition process that allows clients a chance to help the competitors revise and refine their submissions to increase their chances of winning. It’s called Milestone Feedback and here’s a perfect example of how it can help a member move from the beginning conceptual stage to a fully refined winning design.

At our yearly on-site tournament – the TopCoder Open – held last week, we saw one of the finalists make an impressive jump from 7th place in Round 1 to a 2nd place standing in Round 2 and an overall second place win in the championships – all because he had the opportunity to revise his submission and produce something more in line with what the client and judges wanted. Follow his progression and see the amazing things that can happen when a competitor uses feedback to create a winning submission. It just proves that you shouldn’t give up after the milestone — with the right feedback, it’s still anyone’s game!

Round 1 submission

Snippet of Round 1 feedback – given 7th place standing
+ good job exploring a unique concept and buttons, execution still needs work
- Hard to determine what the icons are
- Feels repetitive and uninteresting
- Background environment feels wrong for ants, looks like a beach.

Round 2 submission

Snippet of Round 2 feedback – jumps to 2nd place standing
+ Background looks great, your changes from the first round are going in the right direction. Pay special attention to the Overall Feedback. Push your color choices here.
- The leader boards are the most important information here. You can make the logo smaller. Do you even need the logo? If so how does it help guide the user?