In John Kotter’s recent post for the Front End of Innovation blog, he addresses the need for an organizational shift in thought if companies are to be successful at innovating. His solution:

Leaders need to articulate a big, meaningful opportunity that all employees — not just product development or R&D — can get energized about and play an integral part in achieving. This opportunity is about more than increasing bottom line revenue; it represents a chance for the organization to do something with greater external impact.

At Consensus Point, we agree wholeheartedly with this model of engaging the larger community by rallying them around a greater cause. Employee engagement is a critical piece of the innovation puzzle and one that must be solved using several different approaches. Simply introducing a new software or paying lip service to a change in thought is not enough to make change happen. Real change takes hard work and commitment from organizational leaders.

After years of working with Fortune 500 clients, Consensus Point knows what it takes to create employee engagement:

1. Frequent communication from senior management in the form of emails, mentions in meetings, acknowledgement of the participants.
2. Frequent communication of the insights and ideas that are being generated and used by the organization.
3. Clear metrics for managers.
4. A fun gaming element to the experience with recognition and incentives built in.

Consensus Point friend and client, Rami Levy of Motorola, who was a recent keynote speaker at the Front End of Innovation Conference in Boston, puts these ideas into practice. Motorola’s prediction market has improved Motorola’s time to market and increased speed at which the company is able to gather ideas.

If you would like to learn more about how Consensus Point’s Foresight technology helped Motorola and find out more about engaging your employees in the innovation process, click here.

Our long-time customer and thought leader, Rami Levy, Distinguished member of Open Source Technology, Motorola, will discuss the Motorola Innovation process, including their TIX decision market powered by Consensus Point at the Front End of Innovation (FEI) Conference in Boston, MA, on May 18. Rami will participate on the Keynote Panel, Exploring the Knowledge Ratio for Open Innovation at 11:30 am.

Motorola has been utilizing Consensus Point software for the 4 years as a major tool in its innovation pipeline and has realized 8 to 10x ROI in the innovation process cost along with the acceleration of ideas to market from 180 to 80 days! To find out more about how Motorola has used our powerful software, click here.

Last week, we attended the Front End of Innovation conference in Boston. We went in part because the agenda looked interesting but also because we were pleased and proud to see two of our customers—Tina Brown-Stevenson of Ingenix and Rami Levy of Motorola—as presenters/panelists.

We enjoyed Tina’s presentation on prediction markets, and we’re glad that someone reported back to the FEI blog about her presentation:

In a solid FEI Champions presentation to complement James Surowiecki’s keynote address, practitioner Tina Brown-Stevenson, Sr. VP Innovation and Information Group at Ingenix, talked through the implementation of a prediction market at Ingenix. As a lead-in to the details of the specific practical application developed at Ingenix, Ms. Brown-Stevenson drew upon examples from Mr. Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds to outline the foundational philosophical elements for Ingenix’s overall approach.

We won’t complain when a neutral third party favorably compares us to Surowiecki. Tina shared some findings from several prediction market uses and confirmed that the size of the crowd is not what is important— as markets can be accurate with as few as 24 participants. Tina confirmed what Surowiecki talks about in his book— it is the independence and diversity of the crowd that enables prediction markets to be on average more accurate than a subject matter expert. Tina also shared the Ingenix approach to adjusting the interface to their constituent needs. While many public companies, such as Best Buy and Motorola, have found the traditional stock metaphor to be adopted well within their cultures, we adjusted the Ingenix interface to something easily understandable for Ingenix participants, both internal and external. Demonstrates the flexibility of our Foresight platform!

For Rami’s presentation, he shared his notes with us from the panel on innovation adoption. He described Motorola’s idea collection system and explained why an idea market was needed: to identify the best ideas by leveraging the “crowd.”

For Motorola, the value of our Foresight platform boils down to three ‘Rs’ in the enterprise:

• rewards: mostly intrinsic, e.g., collaboration, helping the company, helping others, forming relationships, learning)
• recognition: via leader boards in the market and built-in social media tools
• recreation: fun, like a game; easy to use with low barriers to entry; competition; social media access to enable “viral” messaging.

If you’d like a sense of the kind of bottom line value these three Rs offered Motorola, CFO.com has covered that topic.

We’re glad we went to the conference, and we’re glad that two of our customers are on the front end of innovation through their use of Foresight.