You have a problem to solve, and we have the crowd. IdeaScale has recently acquired Betterific, a crowdsourcing platform that engages a community of 18,000+ creative problem solvers, design thinkers, and ideators to help you come up with your next big idea. Learn more about how you can tap into this innovative community.
Organizational change can be met with resistance, especially if it excludes employee input.
If you’re thinking about launching a crowdsourcing campaign to respond to some of these challenges brought about by COVID-19, now is a good time. We are all learning so much right now and so quickly. And everyone wants to help, so let them.
Calling all doctors, nurses, designers, engineers and designers: join one of the amazing Open Source Ventilator Projects to contribute your passion, creativity, time and expertise to help develop low-cost ventilators to fight the Coronavirus (COVID-19).
Entrepreneurs deal with high levels of uncertainty; probably more than any other business. The more disruptive the startup, the higher the level of uncertainty. Will the customers buy? How do we reach them? Will we be able to sell at a profit? Will our partners do their part? Who is out there that we can learn from? Are there threats that we are unaware of?
After a decade working in innovation, I think many of us are sick and tired of seeing a funnel on another slide at an innovation conference. Lots of ideas at the top, just a few implemented ideas at the bottom… we get the idea.
There are four ways to crowdsource answers to your innovation challenges: garden variety crowdsourcing, distant expert sourcing, expert targeting, and force multiplying.
Looking to the crowd for knowledge isn’t a new concept. The Sydney Opera House was the result of an open call for designs to a global community (to which 233 people submitted ideas) and the now-iconic building was selected from amongst them.
IdeaScale has honored innovation leaders in their annual Innovation Management Awards for six years now. Award recipients have come from almost every industry with a variety of goals (from eradicating cancer to identifying new university technology best practices), but this year’s winners share a few key characteristics that all innovation leaders need to embody.
Every year, IdeaScale convenes a gathering of innovators from all over the world who share their best practices in managing and delivering on new ideas.
In our previous article we focused on some of the serious issues being faced by clients and vendors who are working with innovation / ideation platforms.
If you’re in charge of innovation, it means that you’re constantly being surprised. Not just because technology and trends are emerging that are impacting your business in new and unexpected ways, but almost every project that you’re working on continues to evolve and improve over time.
If you’re working with an innovation management platform, then you know the importance of building a community. The success of these programs is intrinsically linked to the spirit and engagement of your community: how much they participate, how they’re participating, why they’re participating.
When the United Way told the story of their crowdsourcing program, Edwin Goutier, Innovation Lead at Unitd Way, said that one of the things that he hears a lot is that people don’t think of the United Way (or nonprofits in general) as innovative.
In November, the United States Coast Guard presented at Open Nation on their Coast Guard ideas program. They talked about how lessons learned from previous extreme weather occurrences (Sandy, etc.) still hadn’t become institutional knowledge by the 2017 hurricane season when they were so desperately needed. The reason that this hadn’t happened was that all of the methods for collecting new ideas were slow and opaque.
