As a company which takes idea management seriously, Nosco are always excited to see this discipline taken into the grander scale. Furthermore, it’s interesting to see how the administration of the campaign have handled the different types of ideas to generate interest, engage hard-to-reach voters and get fresh ideas for policy and communication.

Here’s how it works

1) Users go to petitions.whitehouse.gov to share the issue they wish to bring to the direct attention of the presidential staff – and the million of users of whitehouse.gov.

2) Within 30 days, they must mobilize 150 signatures on their petition through social networks and personal channels. If they manage this, the petition becomes searchable on the White House website.

3) Now, people can find the petition and vote for it.

4) If the petition reaches a certain number of signatures, the presidential administration will give an official response, a confirmation of the issue being processed on the highest governmental level.

Participation

So have people taken to this initiative? At the time of writing, the threshold for an official response sits at 100,000 signatures. It went up from 25,000 in January 2013, which in turn was a rise from the 5,000 signatures initially required to get an official response.

This growth in required signatures is a testament to the widespread popularity of We the People. As more and more people joined, it would simply be too easy to get your idea beyond the threshold.

As of March 2013, 7.2 million people have put over 11.6 million signatures on more than 178.000 petitions.

The promise of an official White House response to all petitions that reach the threshold is a sign of serious commitment from the initiators, one of Nosco’s main recommendations for anyone wanting to host idea boxes.

Results

One thing is participation another thing is results. What does the administration actually get out of all these petitions?

As one might expect, some of the petitions garnering the most attention are the outright funny or controversial ones. ‘Start the construction of a Death Star by 2016‘, ‘Legalize Pot‘ and ‘Secede the United States‘ are among the types of ideas most reported on by the media.

However, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. While these petitions may have grabbed the lion’s share of media attention in 2012, they might also have been the force behind the growth in traffic on the White House website. Take a look at this news clip abut the ‘Death Star’ idea below and see how search traffic growth correlates to participation growth. This indicates that the more people visit the website, the greater the participation in the campaign.

Google Trends analysis of the term ‘Death Star‘.

Participation Growth on We the People from whitehouse.gov

Engagement

Also, the administration uses the popularity of these ideas to engage different, hard-to-reach audiences in public debate.

Take the Death Star example: More than 30,000 people voted for the petition. In all likelihood, a majority of these signatures came from Star Wars fans, right? The administration seems to think so, and they engaged them in a true Star Wars ‘language’, with a dash of humor too. Take a look at this video below, and notice how they seize the opportunity to inform the petitioners about the space program and the fact that you can see the International Space Station from Earth. As Forbes columnist Kate Kiefer Lee puts it: “Who knew you can spot the space station from anywhere? I didn’t, but thanks to the petition response, I just signed up for email alerts from NASA.” That’s engaging.

The same tactics are applied to process and debate one of the most controversial subjects in the US at the moment: Gun control. In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the debate about gun control remains fierce. At the same time, petitions engaged both sides of the gun control issue and drew attention and signatures to the We the People site.

The Pro Gun segment is hard to reach because we live in an age where the media landscape is increasingly fragmented and people opt for channels that confirm their own views. In such a landscape, many of these voters are more likely to follow media such as Fox News, not a media outlet where the current administration is favored or given much airtime. Yet, responding to petitioners about gun control represents an opportunity to engage directly via email (you give up your email as you sign up for We the People) and video.

President Obama’s video response on the subject has been seen by 10 times as many people as the presidents’ normal video channels on Youtube.

Is this a model for the future?

At Nosco, we see the power of effective idea management every day. Examples such as We the People show that you can make use of idea boxes on any scale, even nationwide in one of the biggest countries in the world.

The promise engages 

The promise you create is what the participants see as result of their activity in sharing or voting for ideas. It’s what drives them and that is why the promise is so important. We the People promised an official response once a certain threshold was reached. This helped create not only participation but real engagement.

Funny and outrageous ideas may get the most attention

Use that as an advantage. Those kinds of ideas can become great PR material as your work gets more people involved in your idea box.

Ready, set… Engage!

Often, the level of your promise will correspond to the degree of your reach. Whether working with a nation, a company or a department, the open nature of idea boxes means that you can engage hard-to-reach segments in positive development and constructive dialogue.

Recommended reading:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/katelee/2013/02/06/we-the-people-2-0-and-why-white-house-petitions-matter/

http://swampland.time.com/2013/01/31/we-the-people/

For us, Volvo stands as an iconic, truly global company with a proud Scandinavian heritage.
Its history inspires us and its future excites us. We look forward to Nosco App taking part in the next step of Volvo Car Company’s journey.

Using Nosco App, Bühler Group involved more than 3.300 employees in coming up with, sharing and building on ideas for the Bühler Innovation Challenge. The final four teams consisted of employees from Switzerland, India, China and Spain. The Innovation Challenge is a great example of what happens when leadership and management gets fully behind a companywide implementation of  Nosco App, paired with a well coordinated event.

As CEO Calvin Greider puts it:

“What’s better than having our own employees generate new ideas for our company and our future?” 

Click to see a short introduction of the teams and look at the winner being announced below.

Using Nosco App, Volvo hosted “X-Jam” to launch the initiative. The launch was truly global, involving a live feed of video and exchange of ideas between employees in Sweden, India, Brazil, US and China.

Simultaneously, all those involved used Nosco App to create, share and vote for the ideas and concepts they wanted to support and dedicate their X-time to in the future.

Volvo has been so kind to allow our blog readers to get a peek at how a global organisation like Volvo’s uses Nosco App to engage employees across time zones, cultures and continents in sharing ideas, giving them direct influence over the company’s future development. Take a look at the video.

So how are things at the front-end of innovation?

Out of the 700 leading global companies, 43 % felt that their process for generating ideas were ‘highly effective’. Less than that, 36 % of the companies, indicated that their process for taking ideas on to the development-stage could be called ‘highly effective’.

All in all, only 25 % of these top companies surveyed rate both parts of the front-end innovation process as being highly effective. So there’s room for improvement. Even at the top.

So the big question now is: What can one do to become a part of the 25 %? According to the survey,

“the most successful innovators in all industries have developed a variety of consistent, manageable ideation practices that are well aligned with their innovation strategies”

The survey continues:

“And when moving ideas into the development stage, they tend to depend on an equally consistent set of principles and processes.”

Here at Nosco, we agree with with those findings, and they do correlate very well with the product and process that our clients seek. Finding those tools and processes that square up to the strategy and ambitions regarding innovation.

How much are the top companies spending on innovation?

The survey pays special attention to the companies that put the biggest bets on innovation. Those are the Innovation Top 20 companies. These companies include Toyota, Novartis, Microsoft and Samsung. In 2011, roughly 75 % of these companies increased their spending on innovation. Conversely, 19 % of the top 20 indicate that they spent less on innovation in 2011.

On average, the top companies spent 8,3 % of sales on research and development in 2011. Companies such as Novartis (16,4 % of sales), Pfizer (13,5 % sales) and Intel (15,5 % of sales) exceed that number.  What is this number for your company?

Overall: Who are the most innovative companies?

The survey also asks the participants to name the companies that they find to be the most innovative. Here’s the list:

Obviously, such a list is highly subjective. But here at Nosco, we agree with the statement in the survey:

“there is no long-term correlation between the amount of money a company spends on its innovation efforts and its overall financial performance; instead, what matters is how companies use that money and other resources, as well as the quality of their talent, processes, and decision making.”

There’s also another interesting trend to make notice of: The top innovative companies seem to turn out new products on an almost perfectly scheduled basis. Just as we know it from collections from fashion houses. Such efficiency in finding and turning ideas into projects into new products and processes on a regular basis is a mark to go by. It points to a structured and strategically well-aligned way of generating and developing ideas.

At Nosco we believe that finding the tools and processes for achieving such innovative success is within the grasp for any company actively seeking to get the right processes and tools in place at the front-end of their innovation process.

Find the Report here

But this blog entry is not about the the guys here at the office or the Nosco App. We hope you can use this advice for any idea management endeavour you set your mind to. The principle is really simple, it’s about clarity. Think: different applications for different jobs.

I’m guessing that you already use one-job applications like these:

• Microsoft Word or Google Docs for word processing
• Powerpoint or Keynote for presentations
• Messenger or Skype for direct communication
• Outlook or another for e-mail

One application for one thing, right?  And if you have a smartphone, you’ve probably noticed how apps also do one thing well

• Instagram takes pretty, retro-style pictures
• Twitter lets you send really short messages and read others’ really short messages
• It’s also interesting to note how Facebook is doing individual Messenger and Camera Apps now

The thing is, great apps and applications do one thing really well.

In other words, everyone knows what the app or application is about, how it works and what you’re supposed to do with it.

We think, this should apply to idea management too. When we look at many idea spaces and idea campaigns around us, this concept of doing one thing well is often hard to find.

Idea spaces are often hidden in the clutter of project management systems, intranet and other internal communication platforms.

Let’s change this. Let’s go for an approach where you have one space, app and application that does one thing really well: idea management.

Give your idea space an identity that everyone knows

Think about how you use Word for word processing and Skype for instant communication. That’s pretty easy to remember, right? Do the same for your idea management application. Name it. Take a whiteboard and come up with 10 different names. Try not to make it too cute or too boring. Sometimes it’s a good idea to include your company name.

Give your idea space its own domain

A great way to give your idea management app its own clutter-free identity is to give it its own domain. While it does cost a little to buy your own domain, it’s cheap and easy to do.

You can use a service like NameCheap to search for an available domain and get a dot com domain for about US$11. See if the names you’ve come up with are available as dot com domains.

If you decide to get really creative, you can use a service like www.domai.nr that combines words with all the world’s internet suffixes (like .to, .ly, .dk) to let you create some really catchy domain names. We just found out the domain ideap.ad is available as we write this. Hurry up!

Turn your idea space into an application to get on the desktops

Online idea management applications like Nosco App are web-based applications that you load in a web browser. To make the idea space really distinct for your colleagues, use a few tricks to make it more ‘app’ like. And best of all it’s free.

On desktops, site-specific browsers can be used to make apps out of webpages.

• If you use Internet Explorer 9, you can use the ‘Site Pinning’ feature to get an icon on your desktop that loads your idea management app in a dedicated window. Voila, you’re now doing one thing well.
• If you’re using Google Chrome, there’s a feature called ‘Create Application Shortcut’.
• If you’re using a Mac, there’s an application called Fluid that lets you create a site-specific browser.

Turn your idea space into a smartphone app to always be there when a great idea pops up

It’s quite likely that a large number of your colleagues are using smartphones today. Again, there’s a free way to make your idea space act like an app on these phones, without the hassle of building a smartphone app and having it approved in the different app stores and markets.

Many web applications, like our Nosco App, are based on ‘responsive design’, which means it is optimized for the small screen on a smartphone. So it looks and acts like a mobile app. All you have to do is bookmark it and put it on the phone’s home screen.

With these apps, you can urge your colleagues to save the webpage as a ‘bookmark’ on their home screen. This is easy to do on Androids , iPhones , Blackberries and Windows Phones.

We hope you can use these tips and ideas to do one thing well: help your idea management efforts become successful, popular and widely used in your organisation. Just as it deserves!

The paper includes a typology of employee-driven innovation and it presents the cases of DSB, Gobain Isover and Vestas.

One of the key messages are, that the changes needed to begin harnessing the distributed intelligence of the workforce are not a radical departure from the way most organisations work today. The most important aspects of successfully engaging in EDI is a relationship between management and the employees built on mutual trust, positive expectations and interaction between the two groups.

LO also recommends that you include as many employees as possible, as the origins of a great idea can emerge from anywhere in an organisation.

The paper cites a 2006 study of Danish companies wherein 59% of companies engaged in employee-driven innovation report that their innovational efforts resulted in better numbers on the bottom line. On the other hand, only 41% of the companies with a top-down approach report such positive effects of their innovational efforts.

Such a case is Vestas. It highlights both the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ values and benefits of EDI. At Vestas, a move away from the top-down approach towards an employee-driven approach has resulted in improved worker productivity and higher levels of job-satisfaction all around the organisation.

Types of involvement

The paper presents threes type of innovation where EDI can be beneficial. In research-driven innovation, employees can contribute with their hands-on experiences and provide researchers with critical knowledge about the gaps between theory and practice. In user-driven innovation, the employees in sales, who interact with customers on a daily basis can contribute with the collected experiences of many users. Thirdly, when it comes to price-driven innovation, the cost cutting ideas of one employee can lead to massive company-wide savings.

Tools for employee-driven innovation

LO presents a list of tools that can used for EDI, such as Lean boards, change-agents, workshops and the innovation mail-box. In the innovation mail-box, all employees are invited to submit their ideas, and they are reward for doing so. Afterwards a committee goes through the ideas and selects the best ones.

In principle, the innovation mail-box may sound similar to Nosco’s Idea Exchange. However, the question is -why not take EDI a step further and use the collected knowledge of the employees to evaluate and develop the ideas using the market mechanism in Idea Exchange?

The white paper comes highly recommended with its usable definitions and great cases on employee-driven innovation. Find it here.

However, being on the run from Hell Angels, Interpol and angry creditors didn’t mean that Mr. Bagger was too busy to put a wager on his own capture in Politiken’s Nyhedsspillet (The News Game )which runs on Nosco’s News Exchange platform.

As the screenshot shows, Mr. Bagger invested in 667 news-stocks at 75, each paying 100 in the event of himself not being captured. While we understand Mr. Baggers’ joy of playing Nyhedsspillet, we do not comprehend why he turned himself in, only hours after buying the stock?

Stein Bagger in Nyhedsspillet

Innovation in Practice

On the 13th of November, we will present our very first Flux seminar. So far, we have planned the first three of these, all with employee driven innovation as the main focus.

The name Flux is derived from Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic Greek Philosopher. About 2500 years ago, Heraclitus articulated his doctrine of change; that all things are in a constant state of flux. This sense of continuous change is the premise of Flux.

The opening seminar is entitled “Innovation in Practice” and deals with a range of the concrete methods and actions that have been applied to stimulate employees across organizations to continuously contribute to the renewing and improvement of processes and products.

We are proud to present ReD Associates and Maersk at this seminar, and we are certain that the participants at Flux will take away insights and tools for unlocking the enormous innovational potential that lies within the network of employees in any organization.

ReD Associates are experts at handling, locating and describing the transformational aspects of business and society in general that help companies understand and employ the transformational ideas that are so important to their sustained competitive ability. Managing Partner Mikkel B. Rasmussen will be at Flux to present some of the key insights that came from an analysis of 15 of Denmark’s most important companies as to how they involve customers and employees in their innovational efforts.

Maersk are famous around the globe for their heritage, results and culture. What happens when they engage in employee driven innovation? Renata Frolova is Maersk Line’s Innovation Catalyst, and she will present her experiences and ideas about harnessing the collective knowledge of the company’s employees for  generation, refinement and evaluation of ideas.

At Nosco, we see so many hidden treasures coming into the light of day when our customers invite their employees to share, rate, discuss and invest in each others ideas across the organization with Idea Exchange. We hope that by coming to Flux, the participants will be given the inspiration, ideas and tools that allow them to find such hidden treasures too.

To read more about Flux, see (Danish)

The key parameters that researchers have used to make distinctions about brainstorming has been the size of the group involved in the brainstorming activity and comparisons to non-grouped individuals. The majority of researchers observed an interesting trend. Smaller groups and non-grouped individuals regularly outperform groups of 8 persons and more, when idea productivity per person is measured. Why is this?
Researchers identify two main reasons for the superior performance of smaller groups Blocking and Evaluation Apprehension.

Blocking occurs when members of groups are unable to focus on, and express their ideas because someone else is speaking. The constraining factors include time, and our inability to comprehend more people speaking simultaneously.

Evaluation Apprehension makes itself known when members of a group restrain themselves from sharing or commenting on ideas because of concern with the approval of others. Speaking in front of large crowds is one of the most common fears.

These two factors impede the potential synergies of larger groups, where we aim to reach a state of collective flow where ideas can be recombined, expanded upon and improved by the knowledge and creativity from all members of a crowd.

In the 1990’s Electronic Brainstorming gave large group brainstorms a new chance. The two impeding factors where addressed because group members had the option of anonymity while the digital nature of the group allowed users to express ideas freely. The problem with diminishing returns in idea productivity in larger groups did not occur with Electronic Brainstorming. Thus, Electronic Brainstorming allows for scalability, and we can ask crowds to brainstorm and evaluate our innovation challenges.

With idea markets you have the scalable structure of electronic brainstorms and add the information aggregating mechanism from markets to allow all members of the organization to brainstorm, support and communicate about ideas collectively.