“YOU CAN’T RELY JUST ON WHAT’S POPULAR WITH THE CROWD”
Silvan Brauen is the head of business development at Rivella, which over the past five years has used open innovation to create new products. He spoke with
HBR about the pros and cons of that approach. Edited excerpts follow.
Q: Why did you choose to crowdsource?
A: We didn’t want a technologydriven innovation, where we add a random new flavour and hope that consumers like it. We wanted to go new ways and, most important, to start with consumer needs.
How well does it work?
Very well. When we first did this, in 2012, we received more than 800 ideas. They ranged from obvious ones we could have come up with ourselves to crazy ones, such as licorice-flavoured drinks and strange colours. The diversity of ideas has expanded our imagination, because we may have blind spots or be overly influenced by something we tried years ago that didn’t work.
How did consumers’ “likes” influence your evaluation of ideas?
We viewed them as qualitative, not quantitative, data. An idea that has eight likes isn’t necessarily better than one that has seven. But we did view likes as an indication that there was emotion or controversy around an idea, which is a good thing. An idea that triggers no discussion and gets no attention on the crowdsourcing platform will get little attention in the marketplace.
What did you do with the crowdsourced suggestions?
We narrowed the 800 ideas down to
20, and then we went to work with internal workshops, focus groups, and taste tests. It was a collaborative, iterative process, and 80 per cent of the work took place after the crowdsourced ideas were submitted. You can’t rely just on what’s popular with the crowd – you have to turn on your brain and evaluate what makes sense. We ended up launching two new flavours: peach and rhubarb. Both were among the top
10 per cent of the ideas on the platform, but they weren’t the very top finishers. The launch was very successful and increased Rivella’s penetration rate by one-third, from 30 per cent to 40 per cent of Swiss households.
Are you using open innovation less than you used to?
Yes, and I think other companies are too. But part of the reason crowdsourcing became so popular had to do with marketing, not innovation. For a time, if you advertised that a product was created in collaboration with consumers, people reacted quite positively, and it increased your chances of a successful launch. Now many companies have done that, so it’s not a useful selling point anymore. However, open innovation can still be a great resource.