Most large corporations have a wide range of customer types. It often spans many countries, languages, and cultures. To help create the right product solutions for your customers, savvy companies are activating their employees (not just the dedicated product team) to unleash innovation from all areas of the company, which results in a diverse set of product ideas.
Yesterday, I spoke at the executive track at the Inclusion Conference in SF to about a hundred Chief Diversity Officers from some of the largest corporations in the world. I was honored to be join by my fellow speakers included Allison Wiener of Clorox, Sandy Carter, Ted Childs, and Pat Waders of Linkedin. I presented three case studies on how MasterCard, Adobe, and Cisco are activating thousands of employees to generate tens of thousands of ideas, many of which go to market.
These “Intrapreneur” programs, which engage employees in their jobs to come up with new ideas, spur new forms of creativity, and generate new ideas that the product teams may not have the bandwidth to produce. Furthermore, this engages employees (esp job hopping younger folks) to quickly make a difference in their job. Over ten years ago we saw “idea” generation websites emerge at Dell, Salesforce, and Starbucks to enable employees to bring ideas forth.
Now, at companies like Adobe, we’re seeing formalized programs emerge with training, executive support, and even a cute “kickbox” which includes documents, energy bars and drinks, and a credit card with a modest amount of money to get an experiment going. By the way, Adobe has open sourced Kickbox, you can download the program and apply it to your own company.
I’ve embedded my slides from the presentation below. I’d love to hear how your company is enabling your employees from all walks of life to generate ideas –Crowd Sourcing ideas doesn’t just come from customers and partners –but also from your own employees.
Intrapreneruship programs are one of ten Corporate Innovation programs companies are launching, learn about all ten in our latest report, the Corporate Innovation Imperative. Thank you Jaimy Szymanski, Adobe, Mastercard, and Cisco for the data, and to Sandy Carter (read her book on innovation) for the invite to speak.
