I have been covering Spigit
and the innovation management market for some time (see Spigit – Enabling Enterprise 2.0 Innovation Through
Market Games (2008) and Spigit Increases Employee Engagement in Innovation
(2009). I also continue to be a Spigit user as they provide the platform for
the Enterprise 2.0 conference submission process. So it nice to see both Spigit
and its market continue to grow. Here
is sample from the Enterprise 2.0 conference.
I recently
spoke again with Spigit CEO and Co-founder Paul
Pluschkell to catch up on their latest news. We began with conversation about the
innovation management market. Paul said that the niche has now become a recognized
market space like CRM and other genres. According to a Boston Consulting Group report
on innovation from 2010, 72 percent of respondents said that their companies
consider innovation a top-three priority, versus 64 percent in 2009. In
addition, 84 percent of respondents said their companies consider innovation an
important or extremely important lever in their ability to reap the benefits of
an economic recovery. This need has helped to fuel the innovation market.
I have seen a number of high profile successes in
innovation management like Cisco I-Prize (see for example my posts (Cisco Launches Second I-Prize Competition (2010) and
Cisco I-Prize: The Cisco Co-Creation Contest (2007). Spigit has become the platform for Cisco’s new I-Prize
"Idea Market," which provides contest participants with the option to
"invest" in the idea they deemed most deserving of the $250,000 grand
prize. They are given investment points at the start and then can earn more
through active participation in the event. This has helped achieve a three-fold
increase in engagement in the second year of the contest.
Paul
said creating greater engagement is a major focus of his firm. They provide a dedicated community
manager bundled with their enterprise SaaS fees and employ behavioral science
techniques like offering incentives and rewareds to foster this engagement.
They now also offer optional professional services for firms that want to
create customized reports or extend the platform based in Boulder, CO.
We
discussed some of the features in the new S3 release. There are greater
analytic capabilities and they added Google Analytics as one step in this
direction. They used their own
product to gain customer feedback for new ideas. Some of the ones they implemented
include: auto-save at 20 second intervals, widget-based features, drag and drop
administration capabilities to make use of these widgets, themes, and the more
back end reporting. As part of S3, administrators now have the ability to move
ideas across categories and communities. You can also host Spigit on Sharepoint
or on its own platform.
Spigit
collects a lot of data in the process of managing innovation. Now users can
generate custom reports with just a few clicks. These reports are then dynamically
updated. Examples include most popular ideas, most popular participants, and
what is the stage were each idea is currently located. This can be used for diagnosis as it
can track why certain ideas are getting stuck in particular stages of the
process. Spigit also allows clients to benchmark their idea generation process
against others based on their aggregated data.
We
discussed a few client examples. Met Life has launched 60-day employee idea
events. From the hundreds of ideas submitted they have selected six and these
have a projected ROI of over 4 million in revenue. Southwest Airlines is using
Spigit to management its employee suggestion process. The
platform encourages cross-functional collaboration by facilitating transparency
and enabling discussions among all work groups. The Spigit platform helps
dictate a path for an idea to best become implemented and identifies the most
valuable and top participants on the platform. Through an enhanced logical flow
of communication between all work departments, new ideas are created along with
solutions to problems that executives never knew existed. The ability to
define, measure, analyze and implement ideas created a better understanding of
process and improvement. I like the effort spent on process, as well as
technology here.
Paul
said that Spigit
had its largest growth of bookings in Q2 2010. They saw a growth of 287 percent
compared to the previous quarter and solid growth of 308 percent compared to
the same quarter last year. The company doubled their customer base and grew
its employee base by 107% since January 1, 2010. This is even more impressive
given the general state of the economy.
It shows to me that there is always market for good ideas. Now there is a market for better ways
to management the growth of these ideas.