Innovation governance while user innovation flourishes

Letting a thousand flowers bloom when enabling your user community to innovate sounds promising. Eventually there must come something good and novel out of such a process, mustn't it?
While having your user base innovate for you is hard in itself, collecting and actually producing real products and services out of that is the real hard nut to crack.
Look at Lego who invited their users to innovate new sets out of the basic building blocks. A tremendous amount of creativity and energy went into coming up with new designs. From those designs Lego collected the most popular ones and turned them into retail products. The rest remains on the web-page for everyone to download and find the pieces themselves.
The main difference here compared to most organizations is that the main activity in playing with Lego is to build things from scratch. The most exciting creation is already today seen with much envy and heavily copied. So the DNA of the product is to create new designs.
How do you translate this into other products?
You need to clearly govern your innovation work making sure you capture the most innovative ideas from your users. How can I govern my innovation process?
We have found that the following areas are helpful in identifying where to focus your efforts when dealing with customer interaction:

• Involve the Lead users
• Who are your most innovate users? In which environment does the most creative new ways of using your product thrive? Identify where innovation is most likely to occur and watch users closely. Invite yourself to watch, talk and co-create new uses. Give them specific tools like Lego did when creating special software to design and store new sets to be posted and shared on the Lego web-site.
• Define goals and measure effects
• When executing innovation projects, what are the goals? New products, new usages, new segments, lowering production costs, or something else? Establish measuring and visualization on a daily level so that progress can be viewed and measured with short feedback loops. Why everyday, isn't that too often? Most of the tasks in an innovation project are repetitive and trackable. Involving users means that you probably have hundreds or thousands of users involved in all kinds of experimentation and design. That activity needs to be measured and visualized to enable progress and not turn it into chaos where you don't know what is actually going on.
• Resource allocation
• How do you assign resources to new projects? On which parameters are new initiatives weighted and prioritized? Having  resource fluidity where resources are flexibly assigned to projects regardless of their home turf of the resource owner is one of the most important ways to create strategic agility. When a user comes up with a new usage it should not be up to that specific organizational unit to decide on how to explore it. Resources has to flow between units and organizations to enable fast leverage of the opportunity.

Govern your innovation efforts through flexible resource allocation based on clear set goals and effect tracking in collaboration with your lead-users. This will maximize your return on innovation where early and close user involvement and customer interaction secures clear user benefits. Your innovation employees will combine their product insights with users everyday knowledge of how to apply the product.