When investing in a bottom-up innovation management approach, you get to call on people’s knowledge and experience to help you separate the wheat from the chaff and find concrete and innovative solutions, mainly at micro level. You can save time and money by having your employees contribute ideas for the cost-cutting strategy, as well as cost-optimisation ideas that can transform and impact the company positively. Examples from our clients show just that.

Simple ideas such as ‘set as default printing on both sides’, ‘reduce the number of floors or buildings being used during night or weekend shifts’ or ‘use more efficient watering systems in the green areas of the company’ can have significant impacts on your costs. What’s more, they can boost morale by promoting a culture of sustainability, in all corners of your company.

When can an innovation management software be useful?

In large multinational companies with multi-regional presence, it may however be difficult to listen to all your people on the ground. Through its capacity to engage employees across borders, an innovation management platform becomes a powerful tool.

If this is the case in your organisation, make sure you get a solution that offers multi-language features – where employees can have access to the content and strategic cost-cutting challenges presented by management in their native language and make use of their business knowledge to create ideas and help others improve theirs.

Your innovation management platform should be centralised, but allow for the creation of target and country communities to which specific challenges can be issued. Think, for instance, how remote the problem of wasting paper bags in stores in the US can seem to someone building components in Asia.

Gamification elements are also valuable, as they are designed to capture different types of participants, to develop greater loyalty and promote higher use. Participation will be more frequent when users feel their ideas and insights are valued and turn into real solutions.

Andreia Agostinho Dias, Sales Executive
Diana Neves de Carvalho, Exago’s CEO

You can access the full paper here