Innovation with Yammer

Mapping Yammer Conversations

In February 2011 an organisation called Tomorrow at Work organised "The 2011 Worlds Biggest Green Drinks - 500 Little Ideas" event. The idea was to solicit 500 ideas around sustainability and social change through on-line conversations over a period of 10 days leading up to the celebratory physical event held in Melbourne Australia.

The on-line conversation and idea solicitation was hosted by Social Software platform Yammer. Optimice undertook to map the conversational connections on a daily basis as ideas and innovations evolved.

Reading the map

The map below is an extract of the mapping at the time of the final event. If you want to see how the conversation evolved move the strength slider to the far right and then slowly move it back to the left.

Red nodes are sponsors/exploiters.

The red nodes identify those people who were sponsoring discussion themes and ultimately have responsibility for exploiting the ideas solicited in the forum.

Blue nodes are explorers/idea generators.

The Blue nodes are those engaged in the creation of the ideas. Note that with crowd sourced innovation we have the exploiters and explorers conversing and co-developing ideas virtually from the beginning. This is in contrast to conventional innovation methods where the exploiters tend to be engaged much later in the idea development cycle.

Read more about our 3E's of innovation model to see how a networks perspective of innovation can lead to greater innovation success.

The size of the nodes reflects relative number of connections.