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).
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).
Last month, leaders in public sector innovation gathered to discuss ways of crowdsourcing new solutions to longstanding problems at IdeaScale’s Open Nation DC. Speakers from a range of agencies as diverse as the FDA and the US Coast Guard presented best practices on creating actionable change in government.
Lots of industries care about intellectual property and proprietary information, but perhaps none more so than the automotive industry where product development is seen as the competitive edge.
In November, the United States Coast Guard presented at Open Nation on their Coast Guard ideas program. They talked about how lessons learned from previous extreme weather occurrences (Sandy, etc.) still hadn’t become institutional knowledge by the 2017 hurricane season when they were so desperately needed. The reason that this hadn’t happened was that all of the methods for collecting new ideas were slow and opaque.
Disruptive ideas don’t just happen - they must be championed. In doing so, intrapreneurs must address two fundamental truths when leading big idea innovation: that of value creation and that of persuasive communication. If you want to learn how to scale innovation across your enterprise and create a disciplined approach for creating market-changing ideas, One Hour Innovator is a great place to start.
When it comes to implementation there are three things that companies ought to be thinking about in order to maintain a competitive advantage: process, feedback, and the importance of having multiple stakeholders from the beginning. Learn more in this Open Innovation Guide from IdeaScale.
Crowdsourced innovation is a tactic used more and more often by government organizations as well as enterprise corporations. This means that innovation teams need to add a new skill set to their resumé: communications.
The list of problems that need to be solved is growing almost as fast as our solutions are. Some are concerned about the lack of food and water security, others worry about access to education and a whopping 45.2% of millennials think today’s most pressing problem is the destruction of natural resources. But with the proliferation of problems, organizations and enterprises are broadening their search for innovative solutions and many of them are looking to the crowd for ideas.
For many years, companies were convinced of the competitive advantage of closed research and development. They jealously protected their intellectual property behind closed doors and dramatically revealed it to the public after years of development. This old model has since been replaced by open innovation.
Innovation has become a business mantra and a word that threatens to lose all meaning every time it’s uttered at another conference or thrown into another book title. But in spite of its omnipresence it continues to be essential – a growing field – and one of the only practices that might save businesses from extinction.
Running a small business is not easy, especially when the small business is just starting out. Any misstep, even well-intentioned, can cause a serious setback. But have no fear! There’s a whole untapped squad of people out there ready to work for you for free! Here are three ways crowdsourcing is good for small businesses.
Although innovation programs are becoming more and more embedded within the enterprise, it is still very common to find organizations that are just starting to experiment with formal, continuous innovation programs. Many IdeaScale clients that come to us are quietly launching pilot programs as proof-of-concept initiatives that will confirm innovation value for senior leadership.
Even before the term was coined in Wired Magazine in 2006, crowdsourcing was utilized as a way to accomplish goals. The strategy had been used for several hundred years before it was officially given a name, but since being named, crowdsourcing has grown into a huge field, spawning subdivisions of the strategy and being used for a multitude of purposes. Wikipedia is one of the most recognizable and mainstream instances of crowdsourcing, designed to elicit and compile knowledge from the masses. Crowdsourcing has been used in real time to track public transportation and traffic updates with various apps.
Over the last few years, innovation has become a ubiquitous branding tool. Whether you are a blue-chip company or a local start-up, innovation has entered the everyday lexicon of CEOs and administrative staff. Compared to prior marketing trends, innovation is not a passive buzzword—it is critical to the success of your company.
