A recipe for Collaborative Innovation and Product Development?
I have been following Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir journey since 2009. Whitacre is one of the most popular choral conductor-composers working today. He says that the idea of a virtual choir came to him when a 17-year-old recorded a video of herself singing Whitacre’s Sleep and posted it on YouTube. Whitacre wondered if he could get a group of people to sing one of his pieces and blend it into a single online choral performance. So, he recorded a video of himself conducting and supplied the sheet music on-line. The first virtual choir production, Lux Aurumque, was posted five years ago on YouTube. It featured 185 singers from 12 countries. The video has received more than 3 million views.
The second virtual choir project, Sleep, was released in 2011, featuring more than 2,000 voices from 58 countries. The third virtual choir production, Water Night, was released in 2012. It included 3,746 voices from 73 countries. The fourth virtual choir production, Fly to Paradise, was released in 2013 featuring 8,409 videos of 5,905 singers from 101 countries.
By all measures, the virtual choir project is a great success. I asked myself “What are the principles of its success? And, can these principles be applied to Collaborative Innovation and Product Development?” Below are my thoughts. I welcome your comments.
Principle 1: The purpose of your innovation or development should inspire people and activate their passion:
“…Singers of every race, creed, and color, coming together for one reason and one reason only: to be a part of something larger than themselves.” Whitacre said in his online comments.
Virtual Choir Forum Community members, in response to the question “What does it mean to be part of VC?” used expressions like “… challenge myself,” “…to be part of something so much bigger than myself” and “…to leave a legacy behind.”
Principle 2: Build a close-knit team or community around your innovation and/or product:
Virtual Choir Community has a vibrant online forum where projects are coordinated and new ideas emerge. Whitacre and his core team engage the community with updates and new content as well as respond to ideas and questions. With the open culture, mutual respect and trust encouraged by Whitacre, the community members are also actively engaged among themselves. Local communities are formed where experienced musicians mentor and train newcomers and novice musicians.
Principle 3: Leverage smart, readily accessible, and easy-to-use technology as part of the process:
Whitacre’s team facilitate their process using simple tools, such as video capturing and publishing on YouTube, which are easily accessible to their community members.
Principle 4: Continuously push boundaries by experimenting with new approaches:
Whitacre’s latest virtual choir experiment is collaboration in real time using Skype, which he demonstrated at a 2013 TED conference.
Watch this video, where Whitacre tells the story of Virtual Choir as part of a Kickstarter campaign for his fourth virtual choir.
I would love to hear from you. Are you satisfied with your collaborative innovation and product development? What is working and what is not? Do you have experiments underway to improve collaboration?
For more on the topic of Collaboration join us in Plymouth, Michigan on October 3 for our workshop "Collaboration, Integration, and Sustainability: Keys to Maximizing the Value of PLM."
Suna Polat
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