Ideas are nothing without development and execution — the most important part of your innovation programme. After all, making an impact is what innovation is all about. Let’s take a closer look at the impact of innovation and the results that both validate your investment and effort and, equally importantly, encourage and enthuse you and your team to give more of both.
Innovation Impact Case Study
Global accountancy firm BDO is a matrix organisation with 74,000 employees working from 1,500 offices around the world. Tying together innovation teams across such a complex business was a unique challenge for them. Fortunately, the Idea Drop platform is perfectly suited to these kinds of tasks, allowing innovation managers to build and connect communities no matter where they are in the world.
BDO launched Idea Drop in 2018 and now has almost 2000 users on the platform. In the last year alone, the platform captured more than 1,800 ideas, with 200 of these ideas already implemented and many more underway.
In 2020, COVID-19 massively impacted the way businesses work, and personal connections became more important than ever. That’s why Dan Francis, Head of Innovation at BDO, shared with us an idea the company implemented called “Coffee Connections”, which had a huge impact on people’s wellbeing and emotional health during a period of unprecedented change.
Dan notes that since Idea Drop’s rollout, the pace of change and improvement at BDO has accelerated considerably, as the platform allows BDO to harness the small changes that are so important to people day to day as well as the bigger, more disruptive changes that impact the company’s efficiency and the way it does business, helping BDO to exceed its clients’ expectations.
Uncovering impactful ideas in your organisation
The ideas that have the power to change the way things are done at your organisation already exist; Idea Drop just helps you to capture them. Our platform provides an arena in which your ideas, big and small, can be identified and implemented in order to improve processes, influence policy and generate real business value.
By connecting previously untapped contexts and experiences — the cornerstone of powerful and innovative business solutions — ideas crowdsourced via your innovation programme have the power to tap organisations’ latent knowledge and disrupt industries worth hundreds of billions.
How to realise your innovation impact with Idea Drop
Idea Drop is packed with tools and functionality to help you guide and govern your innovation process, both on and off the site.
Update and track statuses
Ideas should be regularly reviewed and statuses accurately updated. Statuses are important tools you can use to track the progress and development of an idea and guide the workflow. They allow leaders to transparently identify, progress and develop the ideas that have the most impact on the organisation.
Utilise Pipeline
Pipeline builds transparent and communicated development that creates a feedback loop to drive repetitive engagement, building trust with the workforce as ideas are heard and actioned. If an idea doesn’t progress, feedback helps an ideator to understand why, helping them to refine and improve how they contribute in the future. This visible, transparent development of ideas through the Pipeline cements the role of everyone in the process of innovation, reinforces a sense of belonging and compels further engagement.
Reward and recognise via bulletins
Ideas need to be visibly actioned and developed, their impact celebrated from start to finish and their value widely communicated and understood — because learning more about the impact of crowdsourced ideas can only help you do more of it.
Analyse results via Dashboard
Our Dashboard provides instant, real-time visibility of key stats and metrics to empower you to set measurable goals for every initiative and put data at the heart of your strategy.
