Hack:
Embracing Enterprise Innovation - Empowering the Masses through Innovation Communities

I recently led an innovation think-tank and rapid solution deployment organization for my employer. My team was tasked with strategizing how we might best position our company as an innovation leader. In a radical departure from simply launching a full-scale marketing campaign, we instead faced up to the challenge of defining an actual strategy to inspire and support innovation across our entire enterprise.

We considered the challenge from the basis of what has been successful within our own group and proceeded with what we felt would be critical elements of our approach:

1. That innovation is nurtured, not driven
2. That good ideas can originate from any level of contributor within the organization
3. That input from co-creators outside company borders – such as customer, clients, industry experts – can provide a valuable source of new ideas and input to shape ideas
4. That people are naturally attracted to a spirit of community and cooperation
5. That the quality of ideas improves by introduction, refinement and consensus from within the safety, familiarity and shared perspective of a smaller community initially
6. That after an initial incubation period, ideas ultimately benefit from constructive criticism, analysis and input from the perspective and more diverse skillset of the wider group
7. That corporate control of the process would enjoy an inverse relationship to the quantity and quality of input

Furthermore, we felt there would be four measures of our success:

1. Our ability to solicit ideas from all levels of the company and beyond, providing ease of participation to everyone
2. Our ability to manage the anticipated floodgate of ideas and comments effectively
3. Our ability to sustain awareness, contribution, participation, and collaboration among users
4. Our ability to minimize the influence of personal agendas and shortsightedness in the evaluation process

Our vision was to create a platform for open contribution that could effectively manage all contributions; be workgroup focused; provide for promotion of worthy ideas to scrutiny by a larger team; provide for contribution from parties outside company barriers; provide a mechanism for expanding ideas and assessing relative merit; and be untainted by corporate agenda. Our overriding opinion was this: If the platform were perceived as just another corporate scheme to extract additional sweat equity from our employee base, it would fail. We envisioned acceptance being driven through grassroots ownership engendering a sense of individual contribution, achievement and worth on a peer level. Beyond that, we wanted to incorporate a gamification element to make it fun and further encourage sustained participation.

And just two more small things: The taint of corporate agenda would be difficult to avoid if our solution’s price tag necessitated involved business case justification and its overall complexity demanded any significant IT deployment effort. In short, we felt that our solution needed to be both cost-free and simple to implement in order to enjoy ultimate success.