We were asked to create a network by a professor at Harvard Business School to support his executive education courses. Harvard wanted to be able to quantify and qualify the output from the courses. Harvard was already trialling a methodology of getting people to write any ideas that were generated during the sessions on yellow ideas cards which were stuck on a wall so that people could comment on them.

We embraced the methodology that had already been put in place and used the real world social network to create an open source ideation network online. Every individual had a profile that allowed them to make friends with other users and create interest groups around topics of their choosing. Overlaying this network was the ability to have ideas. Every person could post ideas and comment on and rate any posted idea. This created a huge amount of social competition to have ideas in the first place and then also encouraged users to build and develop the ideas that had already been generated.

The amount of ideas generated doubled compared with the traditional model. The number of comments and suggestions to enhance the original idea increased 1000%, wildly exceeding expectations. What’s really impressive is we managed to build, test and deliver the site in just one week.

We continue to build networks for other Harvard executive education courses, with similarly impressive results. In fact, IBM has specifically requested our networking tool for the last three years.