Intuit Brainstorm Offers Innovation Management

Okay, I know what you might be thinking, but innovation management is not actually an oxymoron. There is much more to bringing innovation to the realization of business value than the light bulb going off within an individual. In reality, as Tad Milbourn, Product Manager for Intuit Brainstorm and I discussed, most creativity is a group process. This is true for most, if not all, forms of creativity, not simply that in business as I remember form my academic experience. Tad told me that Intuit offers unstructured time to many employees to work on their own ideas independent of the tasks they are currently assigned.

Intuit Brainstorm actually the result of a project that started during unstructured time. It is designed to better manage innovation efforts begun within organizations of 500 or more employees to properly leverage its crowd sourcing capabilities. Intuit has supported employee innovation for some time. Until Intuit Brainstorm, they used a structured database to track the efforts. This tool was not fully used and, when used, it was updated only about a third of time.

Intuit Brainstorm was designed by employees operating as innovators, rather than as a tool for senior management to track the status of efforts. It was designed to meet the needs of these innovators. It enables innovators to build a team, get help, grow ideas, and collaborate. As a byproduct, it also tracks the status of efforts, but in a more accurate manner than its predecessor because of the increased participation. Here is a screen shot of the home page.

Currently, there are over 200 ideas preparing for release, representing a wide variety of innovations for both internal use and the marketplace. There are over 4,000 comments on these ideas. One of the new products is ViewMyPaycCheck which allows the employees of small businesses to view the details behind their pay check in the same detailed manner often offered by large organizations with comprehensive HR systems. This new product was developed in three months through Brainstorm.

Within Brainstorm there is an auto-generated activity stream where anyone can see comments on ideas in the pipeline in a real time manner. You start the process by adding you idea by adding your idea through a lightweight submission form. Brainstorm will instantly show related ideas to your idea upon submission. So you can connect with those team members.

Team members can edit the details of a registered idea and others can provide comments. These comments can start a threaded conversation. Contributors take these comments seriously and Brainstorm added the ability to edit comments at the request of users. You can recruit people and people can also request to join a team. The system also makes recommendations on who might be a best fit for the team based on their activity and tags within the system. You can place help wanted ads asking for help. You can also get updates on the tags you follow.

They added Outlook integration to allow you to reach out to other employees and bring them into the Intuit Brainstorm network. The system also indentifies top contributors to provide recognition. You can see the most active, top commentors, and top taggers over the last week, last month or all time. Adding this “leaderboard” increased comments by thirty percent. Brainstorm increased participation in innovation by 500% and increased ideation by 1,000% at Intuit. Here is a sample leaderboard.

Senior executives are able to track the thousands of ideas by such factors as: area, most active, and other statistics. There is also a comprehensive search. You can find both ideas and people who might be able to help with them. I think this is a great tool and I look forward to its arrival on the marketplace. Innovation needs more than creativity to grow. This tool was built from the innovator’s perspective by innovators so it has the right focus and approach.

Comments

[Janelle]

Brightidea also offers similar software but with more viral functionality and web 2.0 integration. It gives companies the ability to gather, sort, track, and implement ideas from outside the company or internally across multiple departments and business lines. The software has evolved over the last ten years to become the market leader in innovation management.

[Paul Tran]

Collecting ideas is the easy part. Turning those ideas into reality is where the hard work is. Would be interested to see the downstream features of Intuit's Brainstorm product.

[Tad Milbourn]

Janelle and Paul, I definitely agree that there are similarities between your software (BrightIdea) and ours (Intuit Brainstorm).

And I especially agree with Paul’s comment that collecting ideas is easy. Ideas are everywhere. What creates value is the feedback, discussion, and collaboration that occurs when you put those ideas in an environment where they can grow.

With Brainstorm, we do what we can to create an environment that makes it easy for innovators to connect, collaborate, and get help. So far, we’re seeing great results from our approach: viral adoption throughout the organization, increased rate of ideation, engagement from senior leadership, and a 5x lift in the number of innovations we’re able to get out to market.

[JT Maloney]

Hi --

Yes, innovation management is a silly term. Trying to plan, organize, staff, direct, control, catalog, index, store and retrieve innovation is not going to work. Never did, never will.

Unfortunately, your example and the comments try to do exactly this. They will fail every time for disruptive, breakthrough innovation. It does little good to inventory and index ideas except for the most pedestrian improvements.

Innovation is better led. Innovation leadership is appropriate. Innovation is a complex adaptive system. The outcome is not predictable. Establishing favorable leadership conditions, such as shared imagination, can and does sharply improve the probability of favorable outcomes for innovation.

Ideas and innovation inhabit complex markets. The innovation leaders are taking a far more effective market-based social media approach to innovation. It's how the big boys, IBM, GE, govt, etc., lead innovation. Here are some...

http://bit.ly/10I2Um

We learned decades ago that the tacit knowledge rqr'd for innovation cannot be harnessed by typical db and collaboration systems. It is hopeless, futile and counterproductive.

Today, it is rewarding to seen market sensibilities and complex systems achieve fundamental advancements in innovation leadership through applied prediction markets.

-j

[Tad Milbourn]

Hey JT...I see from your link that you have extensive experience with using Prediction Markets. We've dabbled in them here at Intuit and have had mixed results.

The key factor seems to be whether those participating are either a end user or a good proxy of an end user for the question involved. To make that less abstract, I'll give some examples. When we've used them with a development team to predict the number of bugs or a release date, the results have been pretty good. The development team is closest to the code and therefore are the best people to make this type of prediction. However, if we were to use that same development team to predict how customers will react to the feature they are developing, the results haven't any better than guesses. In this case, the development team is not a good proxy for the end user (a small business employee).

So, for us, prediction markets have hinged on either recruiting the "right" people to participate or restricting the scope of the questions asked to relevant areas for the participants we do have. In either scenario, it's been more work than worth the effort. Have you seen similar things in your experience? Are there ways to get around the user issue I describe above?

[comment system]

Even though it's hard to accept the very idea of Innovation Management, because It sounds like a structure which will damage the creativity... A second glance at it, makes me think that maybe it is truly a good way of monitoring new ideas, because no one want it to be chaotic. I hope it will work for the best