Every organisation is sat on potentially thousands of ideas for business improvement. These ideas could be from employees, customers, suppliers or academia. This method of "crowdsourcing" ideas is a buzzy term used by many organisations yet very few manage this process as effectively as they could wasting valuable time and money.
From research we know that many organisations view crowdsourcing as complex, disruptive and hard to deliver which often results in many missed opportunities to unlock hidden ideas from employees and embrace innovations already housed within the organisation.
The thought of opening up your organisational challenges to be solved by the "crowd" may feel scary at first. So, I’ve put together 4 key reasons as to why I believe every organisation should embrace innovation and crowdsourcing.
1. The ability to find unexpected solutions
When an organisation considers solving problems internally (usually keeping these within the leadership teams alone), it’s easy to fall into existing modes of thinking. After all, if a company has been doing something a certain way for a long time, it can be hard to break out of this habit.
By using the SimplyDo platform we enable organisations to tap into the talent, skills and knowledge of both internal (closed innovation) and external (open innovation) audiences giving their challenge a fresh set of eyes and ideas. Through involving a broader group of people in solving a problem, a company can gain access to hundreds or even thousands of different approaches to problem solving.
2. Crowdsourcing offers a greater diversity of thinking
We know that organisations want to innovate, but need to minimise the time, cost and risk to their company. As mentioned, we also know that many view innovation as complex, disruptive and hard to deliver. SimplyDo was created to make managing innovation simple, accessible and effective for all. We want to empower organisations to embrace innovation and through the use of our platform show them how to innovate smarter.
Posing an organisational challenge to a wider pool of people can unlock a greater diversity of thinking, as well as produce unexpected ideas.
By crowdsourcing and inviting a broader group of thinkers to participate in problem solving, a company can get access to a mixture of valuable knowledge, experience, expertise, and contexts it wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.
3. Crowdsourcing enables faster problem solving
Crowdsourcing isn’t just about getting access to the best ideas. It’s also about finding ideas as quickly as possible. How many of us have said the famous saying ‘time is money’? We’ve created an award-winning platform that facilitates a quick and timely approach from the creation of the initial challenge, capturing innovative ideas as well as the review and management of these.
When organisations solve problems internally, they’re often constrained by how fast their employees can work while delivering on their day-to-day job role. By using SimplyDo organisations don’t have to worry about these limitations. Our platform enables a simple and effective way for people to participate in the process, meaning companies can get great ideas in a far shorter timeframe. For time-sensitive projects like in public services, this can make all the difference to project success.
4. Advanced technology minimises management burden
When organisations introduce the crowdsourcing of ideas, there’s often a significant management burden placed on whoever is handling the ideas being submitted. This is typically known to take up a vast amount of their time on tasks such as communicating with the wider organisation to encourage their ideas, admin work ensuring each idea is documented and monitored as well as the general management of the project, taking ideas through from concept to execution.
SimplyDo uses advanced technologies such as AI which reduces the burden of managing administrative tasks (e.g. sifting ideas submitted through to managing communication). This allows staff to focus on the strategies for delivering ideas rather than spending time doing admin. As a bonus, the individuals putting ideas forward get a significantly swifter response.
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