At Ericsson, a collaborative idea management tool is enabling all employees to innovate everyday across the organization. After 3 years of use, the pull based and self-organizing system has over 15000 ideas. More than 300 innovation managers globally have opened idea boxes to attract ideas for their specific innovation efforts.

Context

Ericsson has a long history of technology and business innovation in communications, leading the industry in areas such as digital switching, mobile systems and managed services. Going forward, innovation must be accelerated to meet increased competition and broadened to put a greater emphasis on areas such as services and business model innovation.

In the overall strategy, market and insight driven innovation - typically in close cooperation with users, customers and partners - is complementing traditionally strong internal research and technology-led innovation.

The strategic emphasis on innovation is supported by the overall Ericsson mission statement: Innovating to Empower People, Business and Society, the long term business strategy and clear internal messages from the senior team that all employees are expected to contribute to the innovation efforts.

The innovation strategy includes widening the front-end to source ideas broadly internally and externally, establishing a network of connected innovation funnels at different levels across the organization, including a corporate incubator addressing business opportunities beyond “business as usual” at Group level, as well as defined strategic growth areas, relevant performance indicators and an extended innovation toolbox.

Triggers

Given the context, there were several reasons why collaborative idea management was considered at an early stage. First, many of the traditional suggestion box initiatives had failed because of overload and lack of ownership and personal motivation.

Second, several local idea management systems where emerging creating a situation preventing collaboration, synergies and transparency.

Finally, the ambition to involve the entire organization in the innovation effort required a more unified approach to idea management. Innovation had to reach beyond R&D units and include also services, supply, sales & marketing, processes and so on.

Key Innovations & Timeline

Ericsson started to implement a system for collaborative idea management called IdeaBoxes in 2008. The key innovation of the approach taken as well as a major success factor was the pull based and self-organizing nature of the idea management system.

With many users and a large number of ideas, complexity is increasing. Also, in large organizations such as Ericsson, there are many and diverse innovation needs distributed across the organization. This means that it is necessary to design a structured approach to channeling ideas from multiple sources to multiple destinations in the organization.

A compelling solution was to build a scalable and self-organizing system where innovation needs can be activated as they are identified and that ideas are automatically matched towards the existing innovation needs at any given time.

In this way, collaborative idea management was implemented like a pull based internal idea marketplace – an open network for the exchange of ideas built around a host of defined innovation needs – without any central control or steering.

The system is open to all employees within Ericsson globally and participation has grown gradually “bottom up”, through viral marketing. It is up to each innovation manager to decide if they want to use the tool to help them gather and manage ideas relevant for their innovation efforts.

Since the launch of IdeaBoxes, there has been a broad adoption throughout the organization across all business units, market regions and group functions, and in all areas including R&D, sales and marketing, internal processes etc.

The use of the tool has been promoted by several focused idea generation campaigns, hosted by different internal units but open for all employees. In mid-2011, IdeaBoxes had grown to become the de facto idea management tool across Ericsson, replacing most local tools.

NEW! See also the enclosed IdeaBoxes USE CASE EXAMPLE (MS Word) and VIDEO (YouTube)

Challenges & Solutions

When designing the system, a number of challenges were addressed, including How to handle ideas from potentially about 90000 employees, How to handle many different innovation needs e.g. securing that ideas are evaluated and implemented at the right level and unit in the organization, How to drive a culture of collaboration and innovation across the company, How to motivate and recognize employees to participate and contribute, as well as How to ensure cross-pollination and the use of the ”wisdom of the crowd” to maximize the value of ideas.

The challenges where transformed into the following main requirements that guided the implementation of the system solution:

Ericsson needed a corporate-wide system that could connect isolated idea management systems in different units across the organization. The purpose was to achieve collaboration and cross-pollination of ideas and to reduce the number of different and incompatible systems.
The use of the system should be able to grow “bottom-up” – building on local needs and motivation – and scale to reach all employees as well as externally to customers and partners. It should add value to a local unit from day one and work like a local system.
The system should be “self-organizing”, with very limited central administration, and build on the need for ideas (“pull” rather than “push”). With decentralized accountability, each innovation manager using the tool should be responsible for dynamically adding/removing idea boxes.
Idea management should be part of the ongoing internal collaboration initiative building on, and contributing to, a “web 2.0” culture of openness, sharing and learning e.g. ratings, comments and tracking of ideas. A transparent system would also support recognition of innovative employees.
Idea management should be integrated with existing internal IT platforms (SharePoint) with the purpose to simplify maintenance, user take up and support as well as to ensure that the idea database was kept on internal servers for security reasons.

Benefits & Metrics

The pull based approach ensures that the creativity of employees in the organization gets directed toward real innovation needs that are backed by active innovation managers and as a result increase the likelihood of the ideas being evaluated and acted upon.

The openness and transparency of the system creates a direct feedback link between idea submitters, comments by peers and box managers. It is appealing for employees to showcase their ideas and possibly have them implemented and to be recognized by peers and managers.

IdeaBoxes have had unbroken growth since it was implemented 3 years ago. A key success factor is that it has been voluntarily adopted by managers when they have perceived the tool to be useful for their innovation practice.

The idea database has over 15000 ideas, 30000 comments and over 10000 users (July 2011). Several hundreds of ideas, from incremental to disruptive, have been implemented at different levels within the organization covering new products and services as well as new processes and ways of working.

Lessons

Invite everyone and engage the entire organization. Research and practice show that employees are the most significant source of ideas for new business opportunities and innovations. In addition, a common idea management system will promote cross-pollination, facilitate recognition globally and minimize support and training costs.
Embrace self-organization as a key design principle. Avoid a system that relies on a single central point for evaluating or even routing ideas. It is impossible to keep track of the different and evolving innovation needs of your organization from one or even a few central locations.
Start small and scale up. Avoid driving collaborative idea management on a large scale in an organization if you don’t have top management support or a culture that is ready for openness and collaboration.
Start with passionate and “friendly” users in the organization. Avoid designing and promoting a one-size-fits-all end-to-end innovation system in large and mature organizations where you typically already have “pockets” of innovation activities ongoing. Start implementation where you have motivated units/users.
Focus on long-term change. It takes time to implement new practices and tools across an organization. You need patience when dealing with changing the organizational culture.

Credits

George Kakhadze, Magnus Karlsson

Materials

An article about the practice of Collaborative Idea Management at Ericsson by InnovationManagement.se.

Documents

Collaborative-idea-management-at-Ericsson.pdf

IdeaBoxes USE CASE_0.doc

Images

Videos

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February 1, 2016 at 10:09pm

Maryann Farrugia

Innovation has a very important role here, they can create more ideas for their techs. Example in this article there's an innovation, the video (check out some of my videos this is my maryann farrugia youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn2IzUy8h90gE4OMHiBy2Rg ) that is posted can innovate you because you are watching people that is being innovated. Its just sad that today there's no Ericsson.

November 17, 2011 at 9:26am

Angela Lo

I really like how you use “pull based internal idea marketplace” to describe the IdeaBoxes. And I think the recognition of employee is the key to cultivate the success of this idea. You mentioned that “ratings, comments and tracking of ideas. A transparent system would also support recognition of innovative employees.” To grow further on this idea, all new ideas should be reviewed by leadership regularly to ensure we don’t miss any great opportunity. The employee who contributes to the idea can be the “idea leader” and partner up with leadership or project sponsor to recruit employees to their project team. If an employee is interested in the idea, he/she can leave comment to the idea leader and request to be a team member. It will create sense of accomplishment for the employees and further motivate them to contribute to this idea marketplace.

August 21, 2011 at 4:51am

Jennie Björk

The practice at Ericsson is an important source for increasing our knowledge of collaborative ideation. The case presented here is part of a research project at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm called Managing Collaborative Ideation Dynamics (MCID). Magnus Karlsson, who also is Adj. Professor at KTH, is participating in this research.

The overall aim of the research project is to generate new and actionable knowledge about how firms create and use collaborative ideation systems as a means to improve their innovation capabilities. This is done through a collaborative research setting involving firms in an interest group where research results are presented and discussed and also work as a platform for bringing up burning issues in ideation practice. For more information about the research project do not hesitate to contact me.

Jennie Björk, PhD
KTH - Royal Institute of Technology
jenniebj@kth.se

August 15, 2011 at 3:24pm

Raam

I was one of the first ones to be involved with this effort. But I no longer work for Ericsson.
I can confidently say that this tool and the effort can have game-changing potential when used in a good way.
The greatest accomplishment of this tool and story is that it is made to scale for a large organization.
Ideation, when addressed properly can produce tremendous Return on investments no matter how small or large.
I would seriously consider this to be a gamechanger in terms of management realizing that a bottom-up and top-down joint effort is needed to motivate and re-invigorate innovation for the future growth of a company.

August 12, 2011 at 5:09am

Peter Eriksson

The tool is also great at facilitating discussions and knowledge sharing across organizational boundaries. Finding others that believe in your idea or that is trying to achieve a similar goal is a very powerful factor to consider when driving innovation.

August 9, 2011 at 5:51am

Mats Persson

"The idea database has over 15000 ideas, 30000 comments and over 10000 users (July 2011). Several hundreds of ideas, from incremental to disruptive, have been implemented at different levels within the organization covering new products and services as well as new processes and ways of working."

That is quite impressive I think !
Is there a way to get even more ideas implemented ?.

August 11, 2011 at 9:09am

George Kakhadze

Thanks Mats!

I also think that the result is quite good. Of course there is always room for improvement and it is important to continuously provide support to Innovation Managers with their tasks.

The kind of support required would vary from case to case, but in general providing support with business development and processes management should boost the rate of implementation.

Furthermore, it is important to create a forum where the Innovation Managers can share their success stories and provide assistance to each other.

July 31, 2011 at 10:50pm

Artha Nurdiansyah

I liked the idea of "pull rather than push", this way we can have "two sided" effect whereas the employee will be motivated to share their ideas/insights (leads to higher employee satisfaction index) whilst the employer/company can have the benefit to utilize the employee's idea into new business innovation worth to realized.

August 1, 2011 at 12:00am

Magnus Karlsson

Thanks Artha, for your comment. As you point out, the "pull" approach means transparency and higher employee satisfaction. Everyone can see what the current innovation needs are in the organization. Any idea can be posted, but if the idea is relevant for any of the explicit innovation needs (boxes in the system), the employee can expect better feedback and the chances for evaluation and implementation of the idea is much higher.