Introducing the Innovation Portfolio Management Playbook
Idea Crowdsourcing for Enterprise Innovation
What is Idea Crowdsourcing?
Idea crowdsourcing is the process of engaging your employees, customers, or any other relevant audience, to contribute ideas to help your organization to innovate or make improvements to its products, services, or processes. Crowdsourcing is usually carried out via an idea management program. If you’re thinking about launching your own program, there are lots of things to consider. But fear not: this guide will run through all the key points you need to know about leveraging the wisdom of the crowds and the idea management software that will help you to do it.
What are the Benefits of Idea Crowdsourcing?
Growth & ROI
Crowdsourcing generates ideas and solutions that often lead to business growth and value across a variety of channels. An idea crowdsourcing program can unearth ideas for disruptive innovations that change the market or move your organization into a new one altogether, but crowdsourcing ideas can be just as valuable when you receive ideas for incremental improvements to your products or processes.
Culture of Innovation
Crowdsourcing business ideas from across the entire organization, rather than from specific teams, has a positive influence on an organization’s culture in several ways. It instils an innovator’s mindset across the business, encouraging every employee to think creatively to address problems, whether or not they fall within their day-to-day responsibilities. Knowing that their ideas are being listened to and acted upon has also been found to boost employees’ motivation, engagement, and productivity.
New Products and Services
Crowdsourcing enables you to gather ideas for new products or services from the audience who knows them best: your employees and your customers. Across your organization there will be a wealth of diverse viewpoints and skillsets that can add value to conversations around innovation in different ways, while your customers are perfectly placed to tell you about existing pain points and new products or features they require.
Problem Solving
If you’ve been wrestling with a business challenge or a dilemma for which the solution always seems to evade you, the answer will be out there somewhere. Using idea management to crowdsource real-life solutions can help to unlock even the most frustrating or seemingly impossible challenges.
Problem Prevention
Even better than solving problems is to prevent them altogether. Engaging your employees, your customers or other key audiences will help you to identify any risks lurking down the line and give you an opportunity to neutralize them before they do any damage.
What The Experts Say:
What The Experts Say:
The pace of change nowadays requires companies to manage innovation in a more deliberate fashion. It should be clear to every employee what the company process is for testing ideas, and taking them to scale.
58% of business leaders stated that they plan to increase their investment in innovation and R&D, because innovation acceleration is one of the most reliable and attractive routes to competitive differentiation and growth.
An organization should have effective idea generation and development processes to create new offerings, both by generating a broad and diverse set of ideas and by converting these ideas into profitable business concepts.
What Are the Challenges of Crowdsourcing-led Innovation?
Bureaucratic Barriers
All too often, corporate friction can hinder organizations from developing a bottom-up innovation process
Engaging Audiences
Even with the right idea crowdsourcing platform and processes in place, encouraging and incentivizing your audiences to contribute to your program isn’t always easy
Structural Difficulties
When teams are siloed off from one another or dispersed around the globe, collaboration and idea sharing becomes all the more difficult
Idea Overload
It can feel like an impossible task to gather, assess, and implement so many ideas manually
Implementation
With so many different hurdles to jump through, the road to commercialization or implementation can be long and arduous
What is Idea Management Software?
Idea management software provides a platform on which to engage your audiences to crowdsource their ideas and move them along the pipeline to implementation. Your software will give you the tools you need to gather, screen, develop, evaluate, and implement the ideas you crowdsource from your chosen audiences. To crowdsource effectively, you need a flexible and intelligent solution that can be tailored your organization’s own specific needs.
Our Solution
Q-ideate
Don’t just talk about innovation, make sure it happens. Nurture a culture of collaboration to gather, manage, and implement impactful ideas that deliver ongoing value for your organization.
Benefits of Q-ideate
Embed a Culture of
Innovation at Scale
Innovation at Scale
Cultivate an innovator’s mindset amongst your audience and make sure everyone’s ideas are considered
Deliver
Exponential ROI
Exponential ROI
Gather and spot ideas that can deliver incredible bottom-line results for your business
Solve Strategic
Challenges
Challenges
Leverage the wisdom of crowds against your toughest challenges and biggest opportunities
Manage Your
Innovation Portfolio
Innovation Portfolio
Gather and prioritize a pipeline of innovative ideas for sustainable business growth
Don’t Just Take Our Word For It…
We’re really happy to be using Qmarkets’ idea crowdsourcing tool to help drive innovation at the DOT. The platform is going to allow a whole new level of engagement and transparency.
Brian Worrel
Research Program Manager
Intuitiveness is the hallmark of Qmarkets’ idea management tool – we are pleasantly surprised to have not received a single support request from our end users since company-wide launch of the tool.
Dinakar Devireddy
Head of Innovation & Knowledge Management
Once we decided on Qmarkets, we went straight into the fast lane. Setup was very quick and we saw a very special effort from Jaron and Marthe – their support was outstanding during this time. Our employees are very happy to have the visibility to really see what’s happening with their ideas.
Franziska Reisser
Head of Innovation
Enterprise Innovation Management Software
Innovation management takes the form of several methodologies. Take a look at each page below to get an understanding of these core solutions and how they can help your business to be more innovative.
Idea Management
Idea management is the structured process of collecting, screening developing, and implementing ideas that can help your organization to be more innovative and efficient.
Continuous Improvement
Continuous improvement is exactly what it sounds like – the practice of continually improving and incrementally enhancing the performance of a company’s products, processes, or services.
Technology Scouting
Innovation & technology scouting allows companies to bypass these obstacles and deliver new products, services, and solutions that can dramatically enhance their value proposition.
Trend Management
Trend management refers to all the activities involved in scouting for and acting upon trends to fuel an organization’s innovation efforts.
Innovation Portfolio Management
Innovation portfolio management is a term that describes the maintenance and progression of an organization’s various innovation projects.
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