Five reasons why you need a collaborative innovation program.

While there are many ways to stimulate innovation, crowdsourcing has the highest leverage among corporate teams. Crowdsourcing and collaborative innovation allow leaders to harness the creative capacity of employees, get quick wins, scale successful programs, and generate measurable outcomes. The right Collaborative Innovation program software makes implementation and reporting easy.

But in case you (or your boss) need more convincing, here are five reasons why your organisation needs a collaborative innovation program.

1. Collaborative Innovation is Repeatable

Collaborative innovation works in any field, on any project, to produce outcomes. Two brains are better than one…and a crowd of brains are even better. The more people you involve, the more likely you are to solve that business-critical challenge. And once you have established your collaboration platform, you can replicate that dynamic process repeatedly.

Tracking your innovation as it occurs in an online community setting offers visible outcomes and immediate evidence that your Collaborative Innovation program drives engagement and success. Quantifiable metrics are irresistible to stakeholders, encouraging them to take risks and invest in new initiatives, with confidence they will yield a higher return.

2. Collaborative Innovation is Scaleable

Collaborative Innovation programs are scalable to meet the needs of every organization. Whether you are a small business or an enterprise with tens of thousands of people, these programs allow small innovation teams to leverage the collective resources and knowledge of the entire organization and achieve measurable outcomes.

As organizations and innovation efforts grow, inviting more resources and business units to engage is easily managed because the program grows and scales with you. So you can start small, and scale up as enthusiasm grows and positive outcomes accumulate.

3. Ad Hoc Efforts Won’t Cut It Anymore

Ad hoc initiatives are not sustainable for driving continuous innovation. Collaborative Innovation broadens the scope of the programs, seeking new ideas across the organization, calling many great minds to converge on shared business goals.

Companies using more primitive solutions like spreadsheets and homegrown tools are often missing the opportunity to crowdsource ideas from all of the people at their disposal. And many of these rudimentary solutions are focused only on collecting ideas, not the critical end-to-end process of evaluating and selecting the best ideas to implement. The result is a backlog of random ideas that have no way to move forward.

4. Your Competition is Doing It

Collaborative innovation is a competitive advantage. Is it yours or theirs? Collaborative Innovation program techniques are used in every industry to stimulate progress, from building a better product to uncovering a more efficient process. It is responsible for startling transformations, and that pace is only increasing. Collaborative Innovation program software has evolved and matured over the past decade to help facilitate the discovery of new products and the technologies of tomorrow. You can’t afford to let your competitors get there first.

5. Employees are Inspired

Employees want their contributions to matter to the organization, and they want to be heard. Seeking insights from every employee, regardless of position, is smart business. Cultivate their ideas and make let them know they’re indispensable – and they will be. Let them know they are each integral to the success of the organization – and they will be.

Collaborative Innovation programs make it possible to leverage people to create outcomes your competitors will envy. Contact us today to get started.

Brightidea innovation management software enables organisations to harness the creative capacity of their people through crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and unique, specialised innovation management software and services. Brightidea is used by more than 300 leading global brands including Accenture, BT, Cisco, GE, IBM and MasterCard to achieve tens of millions of dollars of financial innovation impact. Contact Impact Innovation today to discuss how Brightidea software can support your collaborative innovation program.