Multiconsult

Multiconsult is a leading corporation of consulting engineers, designers, and architects in Scandinavia, with employees across Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.

The firm provides all the engineering and architectural expertise to both plan and build construction projects. In November 2021, Multiconsult Norway launched its idea management platform to 2,500 Norwegian employees to gather ideas across several levels and regions of the company. They named the platform ‘Alinea’ – meaning ‘the start of something new’ – and the aim was to improve the culture of innovation among staff and achieve a higher ROI from their innovation activities.

Previously, Multiconsult had tried various inroads into innovation but found that it had difficulties in prioritizing which path to follow to realize the desired outcomes of these tasks. Without successful outcomes or financial impacts, it wasn’t clear why certain development or innovation activities were being undertaken.

Having mapped existing efforts, it was revealed that over 100 disconnected innovation initiatives were being undertaken simultaneously. This approach lacked focus, leading to a lack of control over profit realization. Multiconsult Norge wanted to find a way to focus its innovation goals and utilize the real-world experience of employees, in order to innovate at scale across the organization.

Multiconsult’s management needed to address this lack of focus, sporadic engagement, and the method of employee engagement in innovation.

Without a system in place, the strategies used to gather ideas ranged from on-the-fly questions to questionnaires, which are hard to keep track of and prioritize. Multiconsult was looking for a platform that could support its innovation program and engage its employees to drive innovation at scale: Wazoku’s platform proved the perfect tool. Wazoku’s Challenge Driven Innovation® process also ensured that the platform was geared to allow employees to return ideas with real-world, actionable impact.

Sharing, collaboration, and voting features on the platform allow for ideas to be workshopped

They then progress naturally through the pipeline: when employees approve of the idea. Multiconsult now has access to a living library of innovative ideas from 2,400+ mobilized innovators – its own employees.

Their idea management process has evaluations between stages, meaning there is oversight on the process from when an idea is suggested, all the way through to it being refined, realized, and operationalized. The platform allows Multiconsult to create a pipeline of new products and services, improve their operations, and involve the whole organization in innovation.

The platform was launched in November 2021 and became the central hub for Multiconsult’s innovation efforts.

Using a platform to connect all innovation activities was of paramount important to the business’ leaders. Multiconsult Norway wanted to bring transparency to their innovation pipeline to:

• Bring the unique perspective of employees to the fore
• Better visualize financial gains from their innovation activities
• Improve engagement to improve their culture of innovation

Each employee has their own ideas and solutions about the complex challenges they face every day: cooperating with colleagues to come up with optimizations, novel products or services, or new problem-solving methods. The first initiatives before launching was to work out how to create the engagement they need to succeed with using the platform.

Key stakeholders and internal leaders from the Oslo Region discussed and worked together to submit feedback and ideas on how to ensure engagement – because making sure people use the tool regularly is just as important as the quantity of ideas on the platform. This event was a success in drawing interest from those in the organization even before the launch. Over the coming years, this innovative idea management platform will deliver results that simply wouldn’t have been possible without it.