3 Tips for a Successful Collaborative Innovation Strategy

You can’t impose collaborative innovation from the top down, you have to build it up like a strategy. You need to define a goal and a scope, get management on board and provide a specific funding mechanism. Hadi Zablit, Associate Director at the Boston Consulting Group, notes that “management needs to support innovation, set the objectives, explain how it fits into the overall corporate strategy and fund it.”

What is collaborative innovation?

Collaborative innovation is a strategy widely used by companies aiming to broaden their business scope, develop new processes or identify opportunities. Leveraging collective intelligence, internally or externally, through different mediums, the company captures new ideas and can develop the best ones through its innovation funnel.

What are the benefits of collaborative innovation?

There are many advantages to collaborative innovation.

Firstly, internally or externally, this innovative approach is a great way to create synergies between companies and people from different industries, job lines, or countries. Without implementing a collaborative innovation strategy they might have never worked together.

By sharing the costs between the different stakeholders, external collaborative innovation enables the company to better cost control.

From an internal point of view, involving your employees in your innovation approach is a great way to promote their creativity and can help them develop new skills.

Collaborative innovation is also a great way to raise awareness and involve your employees in your digital transformation process.

How to implement a collaborative innovation strategy?

Without getting too caught up in the details, we can divide the conditions needed to get a collaborative innovation strategy off the ground into three categories:

Making innovation the core of the strategy

One of the conditions for successfully implementing a collaborative innovation approach is making it strategic. Every employee needs to be involved, from the top management all the way down to the lowest-ranking worker. The idea is to create a culture of innovation and encourage employees to take the initiative so that they feel up to pitching their ideas as part of a continuous improvement approach.

One way to do so is to opt for idea management software to capture, collect, assess and develop ideas from your employees. This way, not only will your team be able to share their views but they will also be able to add comments and suggestions to their peers’ ideas.

Engrave collaborative innovation in the company’s culture

Just stating that this innovative approach is strategic is not enough; you need to make sure it really becomes a part of the corporate culture. So it’s essential to reward risk-taking, give people the right to make mistakes, turn employees into stakeholders and ensure that managers know how to listen. Anne-Sophie Chevasson, who is responsible for managing innovation at Biscuits Poult, put it well when she said, “We don’t apply a model, we apply values and principles.”

“The atmosphere needs to be constructive so that employees want to get involved,” remarks Muriel Garcia, the head of collaborative innovation for the La Poste group.

Collaborative innovation is also an iterative process. Everyone has the right to make mistakes and start over.

By launching an intrapreneurship program within your company, you will be able to reveal and reward employees with the most innovative mindset. It’s also an effective way to break silos and find synergies between employees who usually don’t interact with each other.

Set aside a budget for innovation

Collaborative innovation has nothing left to prove, either financially (over 2 million in profits generated in 2011 for ERDF Grand Est), or when it comes to the corporate working environment (93% of employees are satisfied with their companies when innovation is treated as a priority, according to Innov’Acteurs). It does require dedicated funding, though, in order to train employees to be creative and reward them for their initiatives, whatever form that may take.

What is Agorize?

Agorize is the most comprehensive innovation management platform, supported by a team of experts and community of innovators. For over a decade, we’ve been providing technology powered by a community of 5 million innovators to foster change and accelerate innovation. Our clients and partners worldwide crowdsource, evaluate and develop solutions from startups, employees, developers and students using Agorize.

We’ve helped over 300 global enterprise companies in Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific, including Enterprise Singapore, Huawei, Microsoft, LVMH, PepsiCo, Bayer, Schneider Electric, Hitachi, L’Oréal and many more by running their innovation programs.

What is an internal challenge?

An internal challenge, or internal competition, is a competition organized within a company to engage employees in finding new innovative solutions. Much like any innovation challenge, it includes clear objectives, problem statements and rewards. When done right, an internal challenge will have multiple positive impacts on the organization.

Not only will engaging employees on relevant business challenges lead to accelerated crowdsourcing, development and implementation of solutions that increase business growth and revenue. It will also foster a company culture of continuous improvement, increase employee satisfaction and retention and attract new talent to the company.

What is an idea box?

Agorize IDEA BOX is an ideation management platform that helps organizations collect, assess and develop ideas from their employees or external communities. It’s an all-in-one solution with features to simplify the process of crowdsourcing ideas, so ideation can be accelerated and improved. Individuals or teams can submit ideas, which can then be evaluated by peers or experts on the platform through grades or virtual investments.

Then, the best ideas can be further developed with the input of others through feedback and comments. Our IDEA BOX solution is popular amongst HR and innovation leaders at enterprise companies. IDEA BOX allows HR leaders to engage employees across teams and countries to contribute valuable ideas and collaborate. As such, positively contributing to the company culture, employee satisfaction and retention and overall ROI. On the other hand, IDEA BOX supports innovation leaders in solving problem statements by opening up to the relevant communities they want to engage, such as customers, employees or other innovators.