One reason is that company managers rarely ask people to come up with great ideas. Instead, companies, and the people that manage them, share a tendency to keep problems to themselves. Many great ideas never see the light of day simply because organizations don’t ask for help from the very people that are often best able to offer help: their own employees.
While not new, there is a growing effort by companies to use processes and tools that harvest the smart ideas lying dormant among their own employees. Some call this Intra-organizational Innovation Crowdsourcing. Or, crowdsourcing within the company that taps into its employees to uncover the smart ideas.
Crowdsourcing itself, described as the act of outsourcing tasks to a large group of people or community through an open call is well documented. Its uses include tapping the wisdom of the crowd for new technology development, design, or the capture and analysis of large amounts of data. It is typically enabled through the use of Web 2.0 technologies.
Intra-organizational Innovation Crowdsourcing, or IIC, focuses on encouraging the participation of a company's employees toward contributing great ideas that normally would have remained uncovered. How are companies using IIC? Here are just a few examples:
- A California-based solar company runs multiple employee contests annually, each with a $500 prize, for smart ideas. Employees are also rated, and compensated, on innovation in their annual reviews
- A research company involves its employees in a contest titled 100 Days of Innovation; employees are urged to come up with a total of 100 innovative ideas by year's end in order to each receive a monetary reward
- A software company holds a new product naming contest open to all of its employees across all functions, not simply marketing or sales, with the best three submissions winning a monetary reward and the knowledge company-wide that the company's product name originated from employee X
- Daimler’s Open Innovation Network allows the manufacturer of Mercedes-Benz to creatively engage with its own employees to harvest creative ideas that lead to new products, services or technologies
- The U.S. Veterans Administration (VA) introduced its flagship VA Innovation Initiative to create an ongoing competition among its employees for the submission of smart ideas. Examples of VA employee innovation include 45,000 employees submitting 6,500 ideas to improve health IT systems; and 7,000 employees submitting 3,000 ideas on how to improve benefit claims processing
