ROB HOEHN
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.
You have a problem to solve, and we have the crowd. IdeaScale has recently acquired Betterific, a crowdsourcing platform that engages a community of 18,000+ creative problem solvers, design thinkers, and ideators to help you come up with your next big idea. Learn more about how you can tap into this innovative community.
At JR Simplot, a new cross-functional innovation initiative recently formed looking for ideas that would help optimize company efficiency, improve training programs, and more. And when they built this team, they realized that a big part of launching an innovation initiative was education. Learn more in this podcast.
If you’re thinking about launching a crowdsourcing campaign to respond to some of these challenges brought about by COVID-19, now is a good time. We are all learning so much right now and so quickly. And everyone wants to help, so let them.
If you’re working in innovation there’s nothing as rewarding as making the long journey from inspiration to implementation.
One of the things that was surprising to us at IdeaScale was that many of our customers came to us looking for idea management software not because they didn’t have enough good ideas, but because they simply needed a place for those ideas to live. How could that be the main reason?
Not everyone knows that NASA has embedded crowdsourcing into their strategy and capabilities. But in fact, back in 2011 (after they ran a highly successful crowdsourcing pilot) NASA established the Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI).
After a decade working in innovation, I think many of us are sick and tired of seeing a funnel on another slide at an innovation conference. Lots of ideas at the top, just a few implemented ideas at the bottom… we get the idea.
What separates the great innovators from the industry laggards? What empowers long-standing hierarchical organizations like LEGO to make big, creative bets that pay off (like the LEGO Movie) while other once-great brands like Tower Records, Pan Am, or Pets.com have all gone away?
It probably comes as no surprise that, according to Pew Research, trust in government is at an all-time low. An abysmally low 17 percent of Americans believe they can trust government to do what is right either all of the time or some of the time.
There are four ways to crowdsource answers to your innovation challenges: garden variety crowdsourcing, distant expert sourcing, expert targeting, and force multiplying.
Every year, IdeaScale hosts innovation leaders and creative thinkers from around the world in a global summit that shares innovation best practices. These leaders share success stories, failures, challenges, and solutions as they get to know each other so that they can call on one another throughout the year (long after the event is over).
One of the most popular webinars that IdeaScale has ever hosted is our webinar on how to select the best ideas. We are constantly being asked by our customers and prospects, “how do I know a good idea when I see one?” Some people are looking for financial predictions, some people want to know how an idea measures up to their organizational objectives, but everyone is looking for the perfect set of criteria so that they can evaluate ideas at some point during the innovation process and validate them.
Bridie Scott is an Innovation Manager at Spotless and she’s taken the business on a journey from a large-scale company with big goals to a company that is listening to and empowering all of their frontline employees in the innovation process.
IdeaScale hosts a monthly podcast with innovation leaders, intrapreneurs, and other game changers out there. This past month our interviewee was Dr. Navin Kunde who currently leads the Open Innovation group at The Clorox Company, a US-based consumer goods company in the Fortune 500.
There are a lot of best practices that we recommend to our customers: start with the end in mind, adopt criteria to drive ideation, use at least seven channels to communicate with your end user, respond to ideas with positive feedback and questions. But there’s another piece of simple advice that we give to all of our customers when they’re preparing an innovation challenge: seed your community with a few ideas before you launch.
