computers should be less friendly

With all the trouble in the banking industry nowadays you’d think your mega banking conglomerate would be willing to seek advice and differentiators from anywhere. You’d also be horribly wrong.

I’ve been a Bank of America customer for a long time and have even gotten other people to switch over because I think their online banking is the best in the business. So, today I was looking around for a particular feature and couldn’t find it. After searching through their FAQs I decided that the feature just didn’t exist. So, being the helpful customer I am, I went to go send them a suggestion. I was going to tell them where they should put it, how it could work, how useful it would be and how it would make their site better. Basically, a solid gold use case they could drop into their product backlog ASAP. The “Contact Us” link was nice and easy to find and on that page was a link to “Bank of America’s Unsolicited Idea Submission Policy”, which reads:

Bank of America and its associates do not accept or consider unsolicited ideas, including ideas for new or improved products, processes or technologies, product enhancements, advertising and marketing campaigns, promotions or new product names. Please do not send any original materials, suggestions or other items.

-Source

Ouch, well, so much for listening to your users and working with them to create a better product. I get the need to protect your IP but go have a talk with the executives at Procter & Gamble who completely changed their R&D model to get more innovation from the outside. “Today, more than 35 percent of our new products in market have elements that originated from outside P&G, up from about 15 percent in 2000″, according to a March 2006 article by The Harvard Business Review. I am sure this number has grown just look at their huge web presence for external innovations called, P&G Connect + Develop. Time to get on the Train, BofA

Years ago, innovation took place in locked basements behind steel doors with retinal scanners.  With the publication of Wikinomics crowd sourced innovation has slowly become commonplace.  Companies ranging from P&G to Big Pharma now try and incent external people into solving their pressing R&D problems.  This model can work pretty well — just ask P&G about the Swiffer. 

This week SAP announced a "partnership" with Innocentive a company that facilitates crowd sourcing of ideas and solutions.  The company has received a fair bit of press over the million dollar prize to find the gene responsible for Lou Gehrig’s Disease(ALS).  The company was originally founded around helping Pharma companies reduce R&D spending.  David Ritter, the CTO, said, "R&D spending at Pharma companies was growing faster then revenue, that is not sustainable."

Clients of Innocentive (Seekers) put challenges up on the company’s site to deliver either ideas or complete solutions to some of these R&D challenges.  One of Innocentive’s differentiators appears to be their ability to make the Seekers secure that the IP they are receiving is clear of claims.  I however, worry more about the implications of competing for a prize, being a Solver.

The company receives all entries for their review so that they can select the best one and reward the prize.  This probably works well in a space like Pharma or real goods where infringing on a patent is more obvious, a compound has a composition or a product does something and looks a certain way.  With software this is a bit more muddled.  The exact implementation of the software isn’t as important as what it actually does and why it is an improvement.  Additionally, software is compiled, obfuscated and it can be hard to even prove if someone has stolen or not stolen code.  Ask SCO and IBM about how much it costs to sort that out. 

More troubling, Mr. Ritter noted that "The bulk of problems on Innocentive are submitted anonymously, because they don’t want to "tip" their hat to the problems they are working on."  Which makes it even hard to find where your software idea or algorithm went.

When pressed on this Mr. Ritter conceded that there was a certain amount of faith the Solvers are putting into both Innocentive and their clients.  Personally, given my knowledge of SAP I would feel perfectly safe in giving in an idea and if it did not win, not having to check every new product for some of my ideas.  I don’t know if this is true for every person or every company.

Photo courtesy of soldiersmediacenter

Community day is over and I think the Mentor Hands On sessions went well.  All the sessions were totally packed which is usually a good measure of value.  I think we were turning people away for my session, which I guess is both good and bad.  If you weren’t able to make it to Community Day we have all posted our hands on sessions on this Google Code site for download.  There 3 exercises ranging from ABAP tutorials to Flex Component development.  For more information about each session, Thomas Jung’s post is a good starting point.  I spent the entire day in just that one session room  — so I don’t have a lot of information about the other sessions.  I must admit I bummed out I didn’t get to see David Pollack’s Lift session or Thomas Ritter’s Mylyn session.

The only other thing I was able to attend was a session run by Amir Blich about the future of the SAP Sneak Preview systems.  All I can really say is that it is great to see SAP looking to the mentors and to their community for advice about how to proceed.