Photo: markusspiske@pixabay.com

Online platforms are powerful innovation enablers – the building blocks to produce outcomes. But they won’t stand on their own. If you want to create a true innovation culture, you need to have as many people as possible participating in the process. You need to manage those tools efficiently.

The typical suggestion box mechanism in which participants’ activity gets restricted to submitting ideas is certainly not up to the challenge. The forum model – where people can submit and comment on other people’s ideas – also has its limitations.

Your participants need to get involved in the evaluation and selection processes, as well. This is the only way to boost the scope of your target and to convince people their contributions are valued.

Idea management software, functioning as an ‘idea market’, has proven to be highly effective at unleashing your people’s and communities hidden innovation potential, crossing all boundaries. Geared to reaching goals, this gets each person to engage and participate more over time, whether you’re seeking to improve performance, find new products and methods or develop a widespread, collaborative culture of innovation.

These platforms can collect everyone’s ideas and insights, regardless of individuals’ geographical dispersion, when carefully designed to:

• Be flexible and customisable to several languages and different look-and-feel;
• Be inclusive, motivating different types of people;
• Be transparent, so that participants understand the rules and constraints;
• Provide (immediate) feedback for people to remain engaged and understand how they can improve their participation;
• Provide social interaction, since sharing, competition and collaboration are decisive stimuli motivating people to contribute;
• Have clear incentives and recognition mechanisms;
• Be entertaining – using gamification mechanics, that make the process more attractive and sustainable.

Following these guidelines, we base our solutions on expert services and a software platform that mimics a stock market – all can submit, comment and next invest in the ideas they believe in, and be recognised and awarded for creating value. Using gamification, this model keeps adoption levels high over time.

Additionally, we use and recommend the adoption of prediction markets mechanisms. They allow dealing visibly with high volumes of information, typical in multinational organisations, and make decision-making more efficient, harnessing your community’s collective intelligence.

# Make participation inclusive
# Make work fun – gamify
# Use prediction markets’ powerful evaluation engine

Pedro do Carmo Costa, Exago’s director and co-founder
pcc@exago.com

READ MORE:
Number 9 makes this a shared journey

FROM THE START:
Innovation programme across borders: 10 best practices to make it work