Community mirrors for supporting corporate innovation and motivation

In this paper we are exploring the idea of applying community support concepts and ubiquitous user interfaces to supporting the motivation to innovate in corporate settings. Our special focus is on the early phase of the innovation process – the phase of idea generation and suggestion management. The key idea is to provide awareness for a company's creative potential and appreciation for the idea creators in a corporate setting by displaying information from community platforms handling the suggestion management process on public shared displays (" Idea Mirrors ") in the office space. 1 INTRODUCTION Starting from early studies in the domain of computer-supported cooperative work, community support is becoming more and more important in the enterprise. The most relevant application area in this context is knowledge management where community support platforms help so-called " communities of practice " to efficiently communicate, exchange information, or find experts (see for example Wenger 1998). However, when looking into current community support applications in corporations one can see that particular support still is focused on clearly structured or artefact-based domains. There is only little support for unstructured domains like creativity, motivation, leadership and innovation. In this paper we are exploring the idea of applying community support concepts and ubiquitous user interfaces to supporting the motivation to innovate in corporate settings with a special focus on the early phase of the innovation process – the phase of idea generation and suggestion management. The key idea is to provide awareness for a company's creative potential and appreciation for the idea creators in a corporate setting using ubiquitous user interfaces. We are following a systems engineering approach, and have currently finished the requirements engineering and a rough design. Section 2 of this paper provides a brief introduction into community support and community awareness. Section 3 then reviews the domain of idea generation in corporate innovation systems and the role of motivation for the overall innovation performance. Awareness and appreciation are identified as the key levers for the motivation to innovate. Section 4 elaborates on how the idea of displaying information from community support platforms in the work environment can be applied to improve the motivation to innovate by supporting awareness and appreciation. Building on earlier experiences with a range of prototypes, Section 5 presents how to use these public shared displays to develop " Idea Mirrors " as corporate support platforms for the motivation to innovate. And …