J.C. Spender and Bruce Strong suggest “innovation communities” as a solution to harvesting employee innovation. Implementations of Foresight involve participants—often employees—in a market process that functions as an innovation community.

Dr. Spender and Mr. Strong’s ideal innovation communities include seven key characteristics:

• Create the space to innovate.
• Get a broad variety of viewpoints.
• Create a conversation between senior management and participants.
• Participants should be pulled to join, not pushed.
• Tapping unused talent and energy keeps product-development costs low.
• Collateral benefits can be as important as the innovations themselves.
• Measurement is key.

If you’d like to see an example of such an innovation community among our many customer successes, take a look at what Motorola accomplished using Foresight. We’re further expanding this concept through our partnership with Brightidea and their WebStorm interface. If you’re ready to create an innovation community within your organization, so are we.

As organizations move through later phases of the innovation process, costs and risks increase. Our Foresight platform can help mitigate risks in these later innovation phases and enable your crowd to efficiently and quickly prioritize the best investments that will yield the highest return for your company. In a later stage of Brightidea’s crowdsourcing solution, the ability to accelerate innovation provides a key competitive advantage.

We’re excited about having a successful case study of our open API for Foresight, and we’re also excited about partnering with an industry leader to be able to offer a comprehensive solution to an important customer need in an increasingly complex world, where successfully managing ideas is more important than ever. If you’re as excited as we are, we hope you’ll want to know more.