More and more companies are realizing the benefits of including their customers in the innovation process in order to decrease the staggering failure rate of new products and reduce time to market. To help our clients with this, Communispace offers New Product Development (NPD) communities in which members typical of a client’s customer base are recruited for their creativity/problem-solving skills and once in a community, participate in a structured ideation methodology, uncover unmet needs, enhance existing products and ultimately develop new ones. They are an elite bunch…we call them The Creative Problem-Solvers.

In the past year, social media use grew 25% year over year worldwide. There is a Babel of voices online, and a more pressing need than ever to make meaning out of the noise. And while technology may be the great unifier or the great democratizer, it is not the great homogenizer–at least not yet. It may be that “the world is flat,” but cultural differences remain.

In this brief paper, we will share some of what we have learned from a study of 8,416 members of 16 non-U.S. and multinational communities, as well as what we are partnering with our clients to learn through our ongoing research and exploration.

Many companies are now integrating the voice of their customer into everything from product and service development to marketing and advertising via online communities. While these communities are generally recruited to be representative of a company’s customer base, the question sometimes remains: Are the people in these communities truly “normal” and representative of our customers? 

This report outlines the methodologies and findings for administration of a short Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI) to 3,223 members of 23 Communispace communities. The research revealed that members across communities do indeed mirror the general population as a whole, with one important difference: Communispace communities attract a disproportionately high representation of individuals who are visionaries, creative thinkers, collaborators, and problem solvers—helping to explain why a properly-recruited private online community can be such a powerful vehicle for facilitating co-innovation.