By Henry Williams
Many companies rely on their senior executives and
research-and-development teams to drive decisions around
innovation. But now, some organizations are trying a different
approach: They are giving rank-and-file employees a bigger say in
which projects the companies pursue.
Under the typical R&D model, a team of designers is
responsible for developing new products and processes, or improving
existing ones. Senior staff may provide direction, but individual
employees are often left out of the process -- a situation that
some say doesn't always deliver the best results.
"Companies began to realize that the R&D department might
not be the best predictor of what is a good idea," says Ann
Majchrzak, a chaired professor at the University of Southern
California's Marshall School of Business.
So some companies are experimenting with internal crowdsourcing,
which is modeled after websites like Kickstarter, where inventors
and artists pitch their creative projects in the hopes people will
fund them. With internal crowdsourcing, employees get to pitch
their ideas to managers and colleagues -- and collectively decide
which projects the company should pursue. Some organizations
accomplish this by giving employees virtual money to "invest" in
the projects they think are worthy. The projects that attract the
most interest are then funded with real money.
The goal is to tap into the pool of unused knowledge from
internal innovators, whose ideas can get lost or diluted during the
traditional product-development process.
"I have a limited set of knowledge, and yet there are 150 other
people in the group that aren't being asked [the] questions," says
Adam Siegel, the co-founder and chief executive of Cultivate Labs,
a Chicago-based company that offers a platform to facilitate
internal crowdsourcing. Those employees, he says, may have an
innovative idea, which crowdsourcing can help ferret out.
Enthusiastic response
Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, an Ontario, Canada-based nuclear
science and technology organization, is among those experimenting
with crowdsourcing.
"We wanted a simple way to inspire people" and engage with them
about their ideas, says Dana Hewit, CNL's chief R&D operations
officer. CNL worked with Cultivate Labs last year to set up a
platform through which employees could submit ideas. Each project
was limited to a request of $100,000 in funding. Within three
weeks, CNL received 38 proposals.
The projects included proposed solutions to technical problems,
inventions and workflow improvements. One idea was to create a
3-minute "elevator pitch" for researchers who struggle to describe
their work to nontechnical audiences. The project was named
"3-minutes to impact" -- dry humor for a nuclear-research
organization.
Once the ideas were vetted, CNL sought input from employees
across the company.
It gave each eligible staff member $5,000 in virtual money to
"invest" in the projects they though were most worthy. The projects
that received the most bids and met their investment targets were
allocated a real budget and developed further. Some at CNL were
initially skeptical of the program, Ms. Hewit says, but when the
winning projects were actually funded it generated enthusiasm for
this year's program.
"Twenty of [last year's projects] were fully funded," she says,
including the "3-minutes to impact" pitch." CNL just launched the
seed for this year, she says, and received 25 to 30 ideas by the
fourth day.
Some companies, such as U.K.-based pharmaceutical company
AstraZeneca, are using internal crowdsourcing to develop small
projects, while keeping their main R&D process intact.
"It's good to do both," says Cristina Duran, vice president of
transformation in AstraZeneca's R&D department, adding that
crowdsourcing helps engage people within the organization on
change.
AstraZeneca recently solicited ideas from employees around
themes such as design and planning for studies, regulatory
processes and patient-safety systems. It received 150 ideas --
eight of which got the lion's share of support from staff across
the company.
It was easy to see the projects employees were enthusiastic
about, Ms. Duran says. One idea centered on a very mundane but
time-consuming problem -- the distribution of safety letters to
drug-trial participants. The company sends 70,000 such letters a
year and needs to get acknowledgments from recipients for every
single one. The project digitized the process, helping to create an
automated audit trail.
"It's quite simple to automate," says Ms. Duran. "But it was
something that hadn't come up."
Finding nuggets
Small ideas are what the Cultivate Labs platform is all about,
says Mr. Siegel. "There are going to be nuggets that you're going
to find, and you're going to do it inexpensively."
Encouraging grass-roots innovation also can help companies
attract and retain talent. So say officials at Armonk, N.Y.-based
International Business Machines Corp., which built a crowdfunding
platform known as ifundIT that it uses internally and offers to
clients, as well.
There is a direct correlation between employee engagement and
business performance, says Andi Britt, who leads IBM's talent and
engagement practice for Europe.
"Engagement is critical for us, not just in terms of serving
clients, but in terms of attracting and retaining talent," says Mr.
Britt. "[It] means tapping into the collective intelligence of our
employees globally, helping them shape the future of our
organization."
Mr. Williams is an editor for The Wall Street Journal in New
York. Email henry.williams@wsj.com.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 10, 2019 22:25 ET (02:25 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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