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Innovation Basics: 5 Pillars of Success of a Crowdsourced Ideas Scheme

By Michael Watkins

Posted on

Changing the world, one idea at a time has to start somewhere. Even the organizations that regularly bring about revolutionary change had a first step to take on their journey. In the Innovation Basics series, we focus exclusively on what that first step could look like for newcomers to the innovation world. Follow this guidance to achieve faster, better innovation.

As long as there have been businesses in the world, there has been employees with ideas on how to improve them. As a result of this, it is rare to find an organization without at least a moderate history of crowdsourcing.

This means that there are reasons why the scheme hasn’t worked before. When looking to get started this time, it is useful to review what those reasons were. Was it pure circumstance? The organization back then may not have had much use for such a program. Or was it something more structural? Perhaps there is a barrier that still exists today.

In this blog, we’ll look at how you can include these metrics in your planning and share the 5 key pillars of success that leaders should judge an innovation program against.

Planning the Journey:

The only way to know for sure is to have some idea of what success looks like. Planning the journey of your innovation program and setting these objectives before launch is critical in determining whether the issues that have restricted you in the past were circumstantial or something more fundamental to how the organization operates.

5 Key Pillars of a Crowdsourced Ideas Scheme:

Once these questions have been answered, there are 5 Key Pillars of a successful innovation program to consider. A program on its own is not a ‘silver bullet’, and the journey to landing a crowdsourced ideas scheme relies on giving these individual elements due care and attention.

In this blog, we’ve taken a look at how you should approach the setting up of a crowdsourced ideas scheme. We’ve discussed some key considerations to have before trying to land one, before illustrating some of the pillars of success against which programs can be judged.

By Michael Watkins

Michael is Wazoku's Product and Brand Marketing lead. Away from the office, he's our resident film buff, so if you want some recommendations for a night in front of Netflix or a trip to your local cinema, get in touch with him!