White Paper: IdeaScale's Open Innovation Solution

IDEASCALE’S OPEN INNOVATION SOLUTION
HOW IT WORKS
IDEASCALE

IdeaScale offers a software platform for open innovation. It is designed to fit your
organization, with the ability to configure the tool to support your processes,
technologies, culture, innovation maturity and strategy.
Open innovation is a new methodology and we recognize that many of our clients are
at the experimental phase of maturity in introducing open innovation as a process.
We structure our offering to scale to your level of readiness and support our clients
with a simple interface, comprehensive training, a dedicated Innovation Architect,
24/7 support, an online customer forum and an annual conference where our clients
get together to share their stories from the frontline.
IdeaScale is serious about improving the way organizations innovate and we have the
world’s largest innovation database containing more than 500k ideas. We are
working with multiple universities on OI-based research to analyze that data to
improve client success both through better product and better thought leadership.
IdeaScale wants to make it easy to test drive open innovation with a first-fifty-
members-free package. As organizations find methods that work for them and gain
confidence in their processes, they can add additional modules (to build teams
around ideas, review ideas, and beyond) as they work with the crowd to develop
meaningful next-generation innovations that help organizations meet their mission.
Overview of Fully Deployed  
End-to-End Process
Fig 1 shows our full end to end system. We generally recommend a structured roll
out of our full system over a period of months (or even years). A full deployment
involves change management, buy in and support from multiple parties in your
organization. Defining incremental measurements of success in the roll out helps to
avoid stall points to gain a positive feedback loop as you build the whole system. Our
Innovation Architects can work with you on the deployment plan.
4EXPLORING CROWDSOURCING AND RISK
IdeaScale & Open Innovation
3IDEASCALE’S OPEN INNOVATION SOLUTION

When fully deployed, IdeaScale’s process spans from strategy to idea generation to
funded innovation projects.
What follows is an overview of the main sections of the process:

Innovation Strategy -‐> Program Design -‐> Challenges -‐> Target Crowds
This stage involves leaders from across the organization coming together to
agree on a basic innovation strategy. The strategy may focus on a particular
technology, business unit or product group. For parts of the strategy, a
crowdsourcing and open innovation component may be beneficial. For these
parts, the innovation team works with IdeaScale’s Innovation Architects to design
a program of motivating challenges and targets these challenges at particular
crowds.
Typical crowds include:
• Customers Crowd - typically connected to the company website or a customer
collaboration community (such as Lithium), the ideation service can be used
for product feedback and innovating service offerings. This crowd is
motivated to get a better product. This can also include innovation
collaboration with partner networks.
• Employee Crowd - can include all or a subset of employees. Great for
providing a voice to employees (especially those on the frontline) to innovate
processes and products. This crowd is motivated through recognition and
support from colleagues.
• Curated External Crowd - this can either be a general purpose crowd or a
specific crowd, depending on the type of challenge, curated by IdeaScale. This
crowd is often motivated to help through payment or charitable giving.
Examples of curated crowds include communities of students or
entrepreneurs.
Typical roles in this stage are:
• Innovation team - manages the development & execution of the strategy
• Innovative leaders (VP of Product, Head of Marketing etc) - provide demand
for innovation efforts, support the involvement of their teams and sponsor
various innovation Challenges
• Strategic leaders (CEO) - supports the changes required to drive change
• IdeaScale Innovation Architects and Consultants - provide expertise on how
1) Develop a Strategy

Example Challenges (and target crowds) include:
• How can we improve our product? (customer crowd)
• How can we improve our processes to be Greener? (employee crowd)
• What’s next in wearable technology? (curated external crowd)
Many IdeaScale clients start off with a small (100 to 400 employee crowd) and
grow from there.
Ideation -‐ Gather ideas from Crowds, social UX, fun, voting & comments
This stage in the process presents challenges to a crowd and invites the members
of the crowd to share their ideas and solutions to the challenge. The ideas are
then voted and commented on by the rest of the crowd. The objective here is to
elicit many ideas and to use the crowd to assist in first pass analysis.
The core activities by Role are:
Innovation Team:
• Crowd selection, recruitment and motivation
• Program management and coordination
• Communication about challenges and winning ideas
• Moderation and community management to encourage activity
Crowds:
• Consider challenges
• Post ideas and solutions
• Comment and vote on others’ ideas
2) Crowdsourcing and Ideation

The important factors are to have a site that is friendly and rewards expected
behavior. Given the ask (small) and the time required (short), the system has to
be very intuitive and easy to use as there is no time for training. The design
chosen by IdeaScale takes many elements from social media leaders like
Facebook and Reddit to encourage a collaborative, light hearted exchange of
ideas and feedback.
Often the database of members of a crowd is linked to IdeaScale to make the
experience more seamless. For example, IdeaScale integrates into Yammer and
SharePoint for internal communities and Lithium for customer communities, in
addition, IdeaScale offers Single Sign On functionality and social login
functionality through services like Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Ideas sourced from external crowds can be routed to the employee crowd for
further voting and consideration.
The output is a stream of ideas and solutions that have been approved by the
crowd.
3) Teams of Innovators Develop Ideas into
Shovel Ready Projects
Raw ideas without an owner (orphan ideas) are unlikely to survive and develop into
a real innovation. What is required is a dedicated team to nurture, develop,
research and build the idea into a fully thought out proposal.
For example, to refine an idea related to a new hardware product, perhaps the team
needs a hardware engineer (to make a prototype), a marketing person (to assess
customer feedback) and a finance expert (to build a financial model).

Experts from around the organization are also involved to provide realistic
feedback on likely costs and benefits of the idea. It is essential to get reviews of
the idea from outside of the core idea team, as these experts have relevant
experience and are less likely to be biased (overly optimistic) when thinking about
the idea. For example, when estimating likely sales of a new product, involve sales
and marketing leaders. The system allows for experts to provide feedback and
reviews in a very time efficient manner.
The core activities by Role are:
Innovators (typically employees who are interested in the idea and working part
time on development, meeting two to three hours a week)
• Join teams researching a particular idea
• Research the feasibility and look for alternatives
• Design experiments to test key assumptions
• Build prototypes and models to gain customer feedback
• Refine a proposal for why the company should invest in this concept
Subject Matter Experts (think Sales, Finance or Marketing employees)
• Help the innovators to estimate costs and benefits of the idea
• Provide feedback and reviews of ideas
• Mentor teams to make sure they are addressing the challenge
IdeaScale modules that may be used in this stage are:
• Build Team (recruit others to help develop the idea)
• Refine (structured process to consider critical parts of the proposal)
• Estimate (estimate financial costs and benefits)
• Review (review non-financial costs and benefits against strategic factors)

The output of this stage is a portfolio of ideas that have been analyzed and ranked
for costs and benefit across various strategic factors. These ideas have been
developed enough that if properly resourced it is clear what needs to be done and
what are the expected outcomes.
These ideas are now “Shovel Ready”.
4) Leaders Decide then Hand-over to
Business Units to Execute
The review stage shows which projects deliver the highest results depending on
the weighting of various strategic factors (for example, which ideas are most
innovative, patentable, low cost and provide benefits in the next fiscal year).
Leaders select which ideas to support and fund. Typically, the innovative leader
who sponsored the challenge, working with the innovation team and other senior
leaders select projects to fund and take to the next level.
Projects may be developed internally, or externally, or a small team may be
incubated offsite in an accelerator like RocketSpace (valuable where the idea is very
disruptive and there is no good fit with an internal team).
Internal projects are funded and resourced with teams. Typically these are teams
from the business unit most likely to succeed with the innovation. The members of
these teams may not be the same as the team that developed the shovel ready
project.
Results from the projects are periodically shared back with the participants of the
innovation process to encourage future activity and ongoing success.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
sales@ideascale.com
Global / Americas
+1 800-‐549-‐9198
New Zealand
+64-‐080-‐099-‐5088
Australia
+61-‐02-‐9037-‐8414
United Kingdom
+44-‐0-‐808-‐189-‐1476

White Paper: IdeaScale's Open Innovation Solution

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White Paper: IdeaScale's Open Innovation Solution