In an earlier posting, I talked about how BP and the government were using open source innovation process to look for ideas to cap and clean up the Gulf oil spill. I also mentioned how easy it was to denigrate or make fun of such efforts. Over the weekend, the Washington Post continued that tradition with a front page story on how supposedly BP is not listening to the ideas. The story echoes the complaints of some of 120,000 of people whose ideas were not looked at.
In fairness to the Post reporters, the story does go on to explain the difficulties of sorting through the ideas. As the story notes later on:
But the reality is that nearly all are impossible, impractical, obvious or likely to make things worse.
. . .
The low pass rate is almost certainly the product of a naiveté about what BP is confronting.
As the story points out, some of the good ideas may not surface until the "after-action" evaluation. At that time, the promising ideas can be looked at more carefully and added to the toolkit for future incidents.
I would suggest that the process will also make an important after-action case study on the open sourcing innovation process. The one disturbing point of the Post story was the fact that BP is not looking at the suggestions posted to the open innovation service InnoCentive "because an agreement with InnoCentive would be 'too complex and burdensome.'" So there are a lot of questions to be asked about the proverbial process of separating the wheat from the chaff that go beyond either the wheat or the chaff or the separating process. A broad case study needs to look at not only the evaluation process but also the entire organizational infrastructure for a successful process. I'm sure that such a case study would open up new insights on the innovation process well beyond disaster preparedness.
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