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.
Announcing the IdeaScale Nation podcast, where you'll be able to hear stories from innovators in government, the enterprise and beyond.
Looking to the crowd for knowledge isn’t a new concept. The Sydney Opera House was the result of an open call for designs to a global community (to which 233 people submitted ideas) and the now-iconic building was selected from amongst them.
Intrapreneurship and innovation are intrinsically linked ideas when you’re talking about corporate innovation programs. Whether you’re calling it a corporate accelerator, an organizational incubator, an innovation management program, you’re relying on the thinkers, creators and mobilizers to share their inspiration and find ways to integrate that value into your organization.
The industries of manufacturing and energy are poised for more disruptive change perhaps than any other industry. These companies are impacted by sustainability issues, consumer attitudes and behaviors, digitization, 3D printing, emerging automation and technology, and so much more.
Last year, one of the most popular topics at the annual Open Nation innovation conference was metrics. How do you measure your innovation capabilities? How do you track your results from established programs?
IdeaScale has honored innovation leaders in their annual Innovation Management Awards for six years now. Award recipients have come from almost every industry with a variety of goals (from eradicating cancer to identifying new university technology best practices), but this year’s winners share a few key characteristics that all innovation leaders need to embody.
In an analysis of high performance innovators (called in this article the “Global Innovation 1000”), researchers made a surprising discovery: “spending more money does not open the doors to innovation.”
Every year, IdeaScale convenes a gathering of innovators from all over the world who share their best practices in managing and delivering on new ideas.
Our products have come a long way in 100 years. Looking back at 1918, the most popular toy in that decade was Lincoln Logs, this year, the most popular toy to get your kid for Christmas is the Kano Harry Potter coding kit.
In spite of the new explosive capacity for growth in both the energy and manufacturing sectors, “And only 24% of energy professionals consider their company to be ahead of the competition.” This disparity exists for a number of reasons, but often because a company’s innovation capabilities are not aligned with a repeatable innovation process. So what are the key inflection points for manufacturing and energy innovation?
The internet was revolutionary in that it democratized the spread of information and ideas at a much faster rate than any other channel in. With the increased adoption of computing, we’ve also tracked the rise of “distributed knowledge” databases like Quora or Wikipedia. What is interesting is how powerful these specialized knowledge bases can prove to be in the context of innovation.
In an article by the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the authors addressed a recent study from the Bridgespan Group that identified an innovation in the nonprofit sector. Although 80% of nonprofit leaders consider innovation an imperative, only 40% of those leaders consider their organization ready for innovation. SSIR went on to discuss the six characteristics that empower nonprofit innovation.
The 97th Floor Mastermind Series recently interviewed IdeaScale about our company, our industry, our vision for the future and more, but we thought that one of their questions about what values we look out for when building a team are worth repeating here for those of you that are looking to build a culture of innovation at your company (whether it’s start-up sized like IdeaScale or not).
When people think of the transportation industry, they are often thinking of auto manufacturers, but it includes a wealth of other companies and products: from shipping and logistics firms, to travel transportation, non-motorized transport (like bicycles) and more.
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.