My first real experience with the Army was as an ROTC cadet at the U.S. Army Airborne School, Fort Benning, Ga., in 1987. There, we received information about training schedules, off-limits areas and formation times one of three ways: in person, through written documents, or by notices posted on bulletin boards (the old-fashioned kind). Several times a day, seven days a week, we would have formations solely for passing and sharing information. Flash-forward to today; the use of social media has transformed the speed, effectiveness, reach and accuracy of how the Army communicates with soldiers.The Army’s use of social media has perfected the bulletin board approach to information sharing. The ability to transfer timely, accurate messages in near-real time to thousands of people is of incredible value. The Army has a largely free tool that all personnel have access to over a variety of electronic devices, and it is a very effective communication platform.There are additional complexities to using social media as a bulletin board, such as maintaining operational security, mitigating and expunging rumors, and reducing attempts to hack or modify official communications. Social media did not create the need for operational security or rumor management; it just made the need much more immediate and pronounced.More Than a Bulletin BoardIs social media just a better bulletin board—or can the Army derive other benefits from it? The communication technology developed in the past 11 years in the social media realm such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all possess bulletin board-style functionality as a central benefit. However, what business has realized is that social media serves as a tool to unify, join, communicate and direct like-minded people and then use group members, advocates and others to become part of the quest to understand, develop and innovate new products or services.Business, in other words, has begun to figure out how to use social media beyond a bulletin board to communicate with customers and stakeholders. Social media can also be used as an innovation laboratory to get the most knowledgeable and committed members to help improve, develop and perfect new products and services.The challenge before the Army is how to employ social media as its in-house innovation laboratory. Some relevant business examples highlight the true potential to use crowdsourcing and social media as an innovation laboratory.Business came to the conclusion that it needed a new way to help find new products, ensure these products met customer needs, and do it much faster. One of the best examples of using social media to support crowdsourced innovation is the Netflix Prize, a $1 million computer algorithm challenge to help Netflix get a 10 percent improvement in its ability to predict whether customers would enjoy a particular movie based on how they felt about previous film selections.Netflix ran the challenge for almost three years and had about 44,000 contest entries from over 5,000 teams. The company used a disciplined evaluation process to select the winner. The winning team achieved a 10 percent improvement in late 2009 and won the $1 million. The genius of the Netflix Prize was that Netflix realized getting people to watch more content tailored to their interests had a financial benefit as well as increased customer satisfaction. Netflix also realized that it had great computer and data scientists—but could it go further to improve the model? It was only after Netflix sought outside assistance that the company was able to make the algorithm breakthrough.Innovation Requires Fresh IdeasEven a market leader like toy company The LEGO Group believes it needs outside help to innovate new products. After all, LEGO sets have been around for decades, with entire landscapes from undersea cities to space worlds. Because LEGO has to be at the global center of so many trends in culture and entertainment, company executives saw a need to gather, assess and implement feedback from brand advocates.What LEGO calls its ideas process consists of four parts: Share an idea, gather support, review, and produce the new product. This process is critical to the company’s success because it allows support for a product to generate, and allows time for a review before the company benefits from an approved project. The community discussion board allows members to interact with each other. To date, LEGO has gone through two annual reviews to support the evaluation of 20 proposed projects.General Electric offers an innovation platform that is similar to LEGO’s ideas process. The primary difference is that GE proposes three to five specific problems that it needs help solving. The company’s open innovation platform seeks to resolve technical solutions for specific power-generation products, for example, or find new markets and uses for products such as water purification. The platform is a combination of the Netflix Prize and a specific business problem, with the open ideas and community of LEGO’s ideas platform.Benefits of CrowdsourcingThe Army can benefit quickly from these great corporate examples to help drive innovation efforts. The initial, and most important, step is for the Army to change and broaden its culture of innovation. Too often, there is a “not invented here” criticism of outside innovation ideas: If we did not come up with the idea, then we do not support it. The Army must realize it can find other sources of innovation, creativity and productivity outside the normal channels of procurement and development.The second immediate benefit is that the Army has an incredible social media following to help advance and undertake innovation efforts. The service has about 3.5 million Facebook followers, 727,000 Twitter followers, and more than 25,000 YouTube channel subscribers. These numbers represent the primary social media pages and not all the major command and installation social media channels. With the strength of these relationships, the Army can notify literally millions within days of its innovation challenges.Finally, the Army has experts in evaluating and measuring the results of innovation submissions, and it also has the immediate social media presence and expertise to begin evaluating suggestions for innovations.The Army should follow an initial crowdsourced innovation path like General Electric’s and identify four major project categories that would be open for eight weeks. It should copy an innovation platform like LEGO’s that is open, allows members to join and vote, allows member collaboration to share and improve ideas, and showcases projects from submission through voting to acceptance or rejection.The first and second weeks would be for initial submissions, and the third week for voting and elimination of low-ranked projects. The fourth and fifth weeks would be for revised submissions based on member feedback, and the sixth week for member voting and final evaluation. Weeks 7 and 8 would cover U.S. Army evaluation and review, with the results posted during the eighth week. The innovation idea winners could be announced at the end of this week, and a new innovation cycle would begin a week later.Here are my four ideas for innovation work:@USARMYSoldierHacks. The Program Executive Office-Soldier has been the Army’s innovation and purchasing hub for individual soldier gear. New equipment brings new ways to fully benefit from the equipment’s capabilities, especially in combat operations, and they should be shared.Soldiers have created and perfected items ranging from “Ranger Pudding” to poncho hooches to the Bangalore Torpedo. A program such as Soldier Hacks would allow soldiers, veterans and other interested parties to submit no-cost ideas to better the performance of individual items in the Army inventory. The purpose is to improve what we have with no cost.@USARMYUnder50. The U.S. Army Under 50 program would allow open submissions that introduce solutions costing $50 or less to implement. This open forum would allow a wide variety of ideas, solutions and potential fixes to be submitted, improved, evaluated and voted on, with the fundamental goal of improved performance at very low cost.@USARMYBeSafe. Safety must always be a major focus of U.S. Army operations. This program would be for safety submissions to make equipment, operations and other activities safer.@SSIAnswerMe. The U.S. Army’s Strategic Studies Institute asks a lot of relevant, timely and critically important questions that commanders and Army staff members need answered. Unfortunately, a lot of these are missed on the Army’s website. By working closely with academics across the globe over a wide social media platform, the Army could get the answers it needs in a timely manner from a highly educated group.In each project example, the Army could pay the top 10 entries $10,000 each. The four project categories with 10 winners each, and the innovation contest conducted five times a year, yields a total payout of $2 million plus the cost of the ideas innovation platform.By focusing on low-cost, high-impact innovation ideas, we can use social media and a crowdsourced innovation challenge paired with an easy-to-build innovation platform to discover and benefit from amazing ideas.