My hope it that people really love discovering the innovation talent they didn’t know they had, and that companies thrive by tapping the innovation talent hiding in their workforce.
— Suzan Briganti; Swarm Vision Founder

Q: What was/is your purpose in starting Swarm Vision?
A: My purpose is to harness the “long tail of innovation talent in the world"

Before Swarm, I had been running global crowdsourcing challenges for a half decade. I never told my clients where the participants came from when they chose the winning ideas, because I didn’t want it to color their judgment.

In 8 out of 10 cases, the best ideas came from places my clients would NEVER expect – like a political refugee in eastern Europe, a stay-home mom in Mississippi, or a mailroom clerk at a gigantic insurance company.

It wasn’t their fault that – due to circumstances of birth or geography — these winners lived far from the epicenters of innovation. It wasn’t their fault they didn't have avenues to contribute to solving innovation problems. And you know, it's a crime how many people are told they are just not creative or innovative. It tends to convince people if they hear it enough.

I realized that we needed to harness this “long tail of innovation talent in the world.” Whether that's in a large company or in a remote village. That is my purpose with Swarm. I can spend the next 20 years on this. Every day is exciting and fulfilling.

Q: What was your inspiration for the Swarm Innovation Profiler™?
A: Letting people discover their innovation skills, and use these talents

When I was running these large crowd projects, I also noticed there are very different types of people joining and contributing. The existing crowdsourcing companies tend to define creativity as artistic skill. But we saw there is a big difference between “mental creativity” and artistic skill. I know people who are brilliant innovators who can’t draw more than a stick figure. There are also people who excel at evaluating and improving ideas, but who are not as good at filling a blank sheet with new ideas. And there are people who are very vocal on crowd sites but don’t tend to contribute many ideas.

So I set about to write down my hypotheses and test them. I started with $1000 and a sample of about 100 people. Over two years, we ran several larger studies, with correlation coefficients, regression analysis and factor analysis — all that fun stuff. It turns out that our hypotheses were true, the skills groups are real, and they are very distinct from each other. We can identify them pretty quickly now, in just 17 questions.

That led eventually to our Swarm Enterprise Profiler. That is more like 120 questions and identifies the eight innovation talents that correlate with real-world business results.

Q: What's in it for people who take the Swarm Profiler (that you call “Swarm Agents”)?
A: Flow. Opportunities. And mutual appreciation.

I know when I am asked to do something for which I am not well suited, I feel more of a “cognitive load.” I can almost feel the gears grinding in my head. The analogy with computers is called “thrashing” — nothing good gets done! In crowdsourcing, asking people to do things they don’t enjoy leads to churn.

My hope is that Swarm members really love discovering and using the innovation skills they didn’t know they had. I hope they experience a state of flow, by doing what they’re built to do best. And in the future, we will offer fun and easy training to help everyone get even better.

People tell us they can’t wait to share their Swarm Innovation Profiler^™results with their friends, even their bosses. I hope this leads to new opportunities for Swarm members. In the end, I want to create a global ecosystem of thriving innovators inside and outside the walls of large organizations.

I also want the world to recognize the full range of skills needed in innovation. It’s not all about the idea people. It’s also the Optimizers who make new ideas better; the Visualizers who bring to life abstract ideas so others can understand and get excited about them; and the Influentials who evangelize the new. We want them all to thrive on Swarm Vision.

For a deeper dive into the innovation skills skills needed across the innovation spectrum from front- to back-end, we now offer the Swarm Enterprise Profiler. We hope that companies use it to discover the innovation talent hiding in their workforce, and that leveraging this talent helps fuel economic growth and greater job happiness!