Crowdsourced innovation strategy through collaborative IT tools

Crowdsourcing your innovation strategy within the organization sounds like the perfect idea generation mechanism. When Whirlpool started to use IT collaboration tools in the mid-2000's to collect, share and collaborate on innovation projects it not only increased the likelihood of serendipity. A side effect was that you could track which ideas were hot - aka which topics people across the global organization were working on. Was it design, pricing or sustainability? By counting the number of projects and ideas within each domain and topic a bottom-up innovation strategy was built. Those hot topics set the innovation agenda. Crowdsourcing the innovation strategy has several novel advantages:

• Don't bother spending time and energy on what to focus on - let your people across the globe decide implicitly through how they spend their time 
• Don't think on how to engage employees and changing the innovation agenda - it's changed by engaged employees in real time responding to changes in requirements and the context where you do business
• Don't have special activities to connect people and organizations - they will find and connect with themselves were it makes sense 

Serendipity and prioritizations happens by themselves through bringing smart people together sharing ideas. Using a structured IT tool fostering collaboration will not just connect people from far away. Such an IT tool will also enable progress tracking, KPI collection and idea repository. Choosing the right IT based collaboration tool requires you evaluate and decide on:

• Who will use it? Will it be a smaller or larger set of people inside the organization? How will you engage external parties such as universities and startups?
• How will you track progress? How long will you track the progress of an idea? Will you use it as a repository to store ideas or will it be more of a project management tool as well?
• What external material will be available through the site? Who will manage it and update it? Should it be only links or will you store it locally as well?

The answer to these questions sets the foundation on what kind of IT collaboration tool you should use when enabling your employees to define the innovation strategy from the bottom and up.