I read this article about leveraging employee ideas in The Wall Street Journal a few months ago that accentuates the value of employee input for successful innovation. It stuck with me because I’ve been thinking about how our innovation management platform automates their concept.

The WSJ piece floats the idea of innovation communities:

Companies that have successfully made innovation part of their regular continuing strategy did so by harnessing the creative energies and the insights of their employees across functions and ranks. That’s easy to say. But how, exactly, did they do it? One powerful answer, we found, is in what we like to call innovation communities.

Every company does it a little differently, but innovation communities typically grow from a seed planted by senior management—a desire for a new product, market or business process. A forum of employees then work together to make desire a reality.

Innovation communities tackle projects too big, too risky and too expensive to be pursued by individual operating units. They can be created with little additional cost, because no consultants are needed. After all, those in the midst of the fray already know most of the details relevant to the project.

We think innovation communities are a neat concept, but we also think you don’t need management overhead to create an innovation community; they already exist! Prediction markets provide another way to tap into innovative ideas from employees. Our Foresight platform has helped a number of customers create organization-wide innovation communities who participate in a prediction market, prioritizing ideas and then driving the best ones to the top of the list.

And this is what social predictive analytics is all about. Our platform unleashes employees in an already social environment and produces analytics provide forecasting guidance. Executives wind up with forward-looking indicators helping to identify real-time emerging risks and trends in demand management, innovation management, and major initiatives. And that’s why we have so many satisfied customers.

We suspect you’ve already got an innovation community. When you’re ready to deploy Foresight to harness social predictive analytics, let us know.

We just wrote about the innovator’s dilemma. As if rolling out the strategic business case for our Foresight platform, the Wall Street Journal followed their excerpt from the latest edition of their management guide—“The End of Management”—with a piece on leveraging employee innovation. In large organizations, employees are a crowd with considerable wisdom. And Foresight offers executives a sophisticated tool for innovation management.

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.