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When IdeaScale put out a call for speakers at this year’s Open Nation (the annual innovation conference hosted by IdeaScale), we were pleased to see an influx of interest from some surprising sectors.

Education. This year, Open Nation will host speakers from New York University who are enacting process and policy changes based on employee input. Not only are staff problems being solved in novel ways, they’re hearing from employees they haven’t heard from in a long time and are improving their overall employee engagement statistics. Considering only 38% of graduates reported that their educational establishment was at the forefront in adopting innovations, it’s great to see that some institutions are looking to solve new problems collaboratively. 

Government. Two of Ideascale’s Open Nation sessions will be presented by government agencies – but those two agencies will be solving very different problems. The Food and Drug Administration will talk about how they’ve made improvements to process and workplace and the Queensland Police talks about how their innovation program will address improvements to service and policy that can help their entire community. Both, however, are approaching the problem from the same direction: by asking for feedback from their employees in a transparent fashion.

Nonprofit. IdeaScale authored an entire series of blog posts about innovation in the nonprofit sector – how it is an industry uniquely poised to solve some of its most pressing challenges with the help of the crowd. It’s also the sector that is most in need of new solutions to solve efficiency problems, finding new, innovative ways to offer services to those who most need them, and most in need of technology upgrades. This year, the United Way and Doctors Without Borders will talk about the innovation problems that they are solving with the help of the crowd. They’ll talk about new ideas that came from their community, but also about the challenges they faced in creating change.

And those are just a few of the presenters, we’ll also hear from Wolters Kluwer, Covia, Sourceability and many others as they address the themes of community engagement, innovation ROI, and idea implementation.

Register here. Looking forward to seeing you there in just a few short weeks!

 

By Rob Hoehn

About the author

Rob Hoehn is the co-founder and CEO of IdeaScale: the largest open innovation software platform in the world. Hoehn launched crowdsourcing software as part of the open government initiative and IdeaScale’s robust portfolio now includes many other industry notables, such as EA Sports, NBC, NASA, Xerox and many others. Prior to IdeaScale, Hoehn was Vice President of Client Services at Survey Analytics.