Maria Krisette Capati 玛丽亚 December 29, 2015

10 Indispensable Open Innovation Platforms for GlobalCorporations

crowdsourcingweek.com/blog/10-indispensable-open-innovation-platforms-global-corporations

The Internet has democratized the way we communicate and get new ideas. Read on for10 indispensable open innovation platforms to help your organization effectively innovatewith the crowd.

Organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, have become more collaborative toaccelerate innovation in their internal and external channels. PWC, Unilever, Kimberly-Clark,Microsoft, American Airlines, and among others are on board. Why?

Because there’s so much we can draw out from collective wisdom. Today your customersand communities are co-innovators and co-creators (and they have a million ways to helpyou nail down what you want to achieve). Oceanographer Edith Widder sums up what thesecompanies are doing: “Exploration is the engine that drives innovation. Innovation driveseconomic growth. So, let’s go exploring.”

Whether it’s your first time to read about crowdsourcing or have intermediate andadvanced knowledge of how it works, these platforms will serve as your references andinspiration for you to implementing the concept in your business.

Chaordix

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How it will help you: Chaordix specializes in community innovation and crowd activation.Chaordix uses crowdsourcing to help organizations gain sustained communityengagement and predictive intelligence with their very own technology, CrowdIntelligence™. The process can be applied to deliver ideas, intelligence and solutions fromthe collective wisdom of participants of team insights programs, B2B forums, and productinnovation communities.

Case Study: Chaordix partnered with American Airlines and formed a “highly-engagingmarket insights community” to understand the traveler’s experience and journey viaAmerican Airlines High-Value Customer Forum; the platform has helped AA betterunderstand the pros and cons of the travel experience and discovered new opportunityareas to improve their products and services.

Clients: American Airlines, VIA University College, Lego, HTC, IBM, and P&G

Brightidea

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How it will help you: This innovation management software is a SaaS (software-as-a-service), accessible via a Web browser, for tracking innovation programswithin organizations. It’s a good arsenal for innovation program leaders who haveadvanced knowledge in harnessing open innovation within an organization where a recordof all the activities, from hackathons to crowdsourcing to design competitions, aremanaged. The platform provides a complete suite from idea collection to the execution ofthe entire program to global customers.

Case Study: Brightidea was instrumental in Cisco’s quest in identifying opportunities in theEuropean market by helping them flesh out 400+ new ideas from more than 5,000 users toimprove productivity and innovation, streamline idea review and development internally. Inthis case study, “the heart of this internal program was the i-Zone, an idea managementportal powered by Brightidea that supports focused ideation, feedback, and voting in anonline community.” And the Holy Grail of this program was the 1 idea that had multi-milliondollar revenue potential discovered from this platform.

Clients:GE, Bosch, Cathay Pacific, Merck, and Nielsen

100% Open

How it can help you: 100% Open is an open innovation platform servicing top-notchcorporations. Clueless how to start? Their 100% Open Tool Kit provides a list of what youneed for your company and suggests what you should use. For example, are you setting aninnovation strategy? Then you’ll be provided with the necessary tool you need to facilitatethe process.

Case Study: 100% Open work with Procter & Gamble and spearheaded the innovationprocess to “identify and develop innovative ideas from small firms outside its own researchlabs.” The objective was to bring new technologies to P&G so they used a methodologyfrom British Design Innovation (BDI) and invited designers and universities to participate in

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the two open briefs on fabric care and wellness. The Open Innovation Challenge providedP&G a cost effective way to source fresh ideas and technologies and the company becamemuch active in product development together with the communities.

Clients: Unilever, Virgin, Department of Transport, and Rolls-Royce

Spigit

How it can help you: The participants in Spigit are already familiar with your business, soyou can gain more valuable ideas for product development and innovation from them. Whoare the participants? The community itself includes the employees, partners, andcustomers. With extra (and by all means, hundreds and thousands of) brains and eyes tothink and see beyond the company’s perspective, you can identify and drill new ideas.

Case Study: Spigit handled Citi’s “Future in Banking Challenge” where more than 46,000 ofthe employees contributed 2000 ideas in the first round. Using their scalable platform, theycrowdsourced ideas from the global community in 11 languages.

Clients: AT&T, Sprint, Citibank, Forrester Research, and Siemens

Nosco

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How it can help you: Nosco is a social platform for ideas where employees and customerscan share ideas and collaborate with you for product development and improvements. Theapp is also accessible via smartphone, allowing your assigned admins to track everythingin the pipeline. The platform facilitates the collection of ideas and has high customizationon organizational needs and good usability. The four key features involve social (where thecollaboration among participants starts); workflow (they have specific stages for ideageneration; measure (provides metrics of progress and performance) andmanage (handling the people and ideas during the process).

Case Study: Danfoss uses Nosco’s platform for their big annual business plan competition,Man on the Moon. The employees submit their ideas and comments and also form a teamto explore. Forming a team in this competition is vital because generating new ideascannot be achieved alone.

Clients: Allianz, Reebok, Colgate, and Volkswagen.

Qmarkets

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How it can help you: Qmarkets offers a full range of innovation crowdsourcing products tomeet a wide variety of use-cases, from Idea & Innovation Management, to continuousimprovement and technology scouting. Known globally for their flexibility, Qmarketsconfigures their product to suit the exact culture and requirements of their clients. Thisapproach has led to them receiving numerous awards, and acclaim in several analystreports over the last few years.

Case Study: Swiss Post, one of the largest employers in Switzerland, uses Qmarkets’software to meet a wide variety of their innovation needs. They recently reported that thisproject had generated over $9.5M in value for the organization.

Clients: Lufthansa, Nestle, PMI, Ford, Bank of America

idClic

How they can help you: An internal open innovation tool for Orange, idClic is used forcollecting, evaluating, and implementing ideas from the employees for the developmentand improvement of products and services. To recognize the efforts and reward those whohave bright ideas, they are highly regarded as “best practices” by the other Orange’ssubsidiaries and celebrated annually in an “International Festival of Ideas.”

Case Study: According to PowerVote, “The CEO, Stephane Richard was interviewed aboutthis seven-year-old platform – “Our employees have 20,000 ideas a year”* – highlightinghow valuable this tool is for both employees and the company.”

Clients: Orange (idClic is Orange’s internal open innovation tool)

Hyve

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How they can help you: Hyve is a Germany-based innovation company that specializes inmarket research, design, product development and software solutions for onlinecommunities and idea management. They also have an HYVE Science Labs where theycombine academic, business, and consumer insights for open value creation.

Case Study: They helped Bombardier, a mobility and aviation company, on their “YouCityContest,” an open innovation contest to generate new ideas for the future of mobility. Inthis project, they have collected 215 ideas and videos from 800+ members from 74countries with more than 1,300+ of evaluation both online and offline channels.

Clients: Adidas, Airbus, Audi, DHL, Nestle and more.

Hype

How they can help you: Hype is another Germany-based innovation management companyin full support of your idea generation, concept development and project implementationthroughout the process based on this three-core service framework: Strategy, Architecture,

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and Execution.

Case Study: Hype was responsible for handling Osram’s significant increase of costsavings by using their platform to boost participation and engagement rates.

Clients: Nokia Siemens, GE, Airbus, and Osram.

Imaginatik

How they can help you: Imaginatik focuses on advisory, software, and analytics to helpcompanies “build repeatable innovation capabilities.” They have helped Goodyear in bothinternal and external Innovation initiatives; they facilitated open innovation at NASALangley Research to source new ideas and concepts and Walmart’s project in energysavings.

Case Study: Imaginatik helped Goodyear crowdsource ideas by facilitating collaborativeinnovation within their strategic suppliers. Imaginatik provided an external access module,an add-on platform, to spark the open innovation at the Supplier Innovation Event. 32strategic partners participated and worked on 17 technical challenges provided byGoodyear’s in-house specialists.

Clients: Chubb, Walmart, NASA, Cargill and more.

The list could go on… including NineSigma, Innocentive , IdeaScale, The Challenge Post, andmore. Are you using other open innovation platforms? Have you used any of the ones listedabove? Feel free to share their solutions and impact in the comments below.

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