Transcript
CASE STUDY
HP Software Energize and inspire employee participation Capture unique insights across departments and geographies Measure outcomes for continuous innovation improvement
HP Software is the Enterprise software business unit of information technology company giant Hewlett-Packard (HP). It is the world’s sixthlargest software vendor with 5,000 partners, 50,000 customers and 13,000 employees. Its software and services are aimed at managing, securing and monitoring data centers and big data technology. Head of Innovation Ahi Gvirtsman founded and runs HP Software’s InnoStream innovation program, of which the Brightidea-based idea crowdsourcing platform, “The Garage” is a key component. InnoStream’s focus is to generate new revenue streams for HP Software through innovative projects by tapping the creative capacity of HP’s diverse employee base. Gvirtsman’s team is based in Israel, but his innovation program spans the entire global workforce, including Engineering, Support, Professional Services, Marketing, Product Management and Sales. “One of the pitfalls of corporate innovation is that people only innovate with their peers – engineers with engineers, salespeople with salespeople, and so forth” Gvirtsman shares. “We believe the most interesting and innovative projects will be created when you bring together people from different backgrounds and cultures.”
The Challenge Prior to Brightidea there was no central crowdsourcing platform for employees to submit ideas. Although The Garage was in place when Gvirtsman came into his new role, he saw a broader potential for this crowdsourcing tool, including an opportunity to better market and promote The Garage to increase participation. But putting that plan in to action wasn’t easy. Gvirtsman explains, “You’re asking very busy people to pause the regular jobs and do something not directly tied to their day-to-
day activities and goals. So it needs to be worthwhile, as well as intuitive and simple to perform.” One challenge was that employees needed to use a separate set of credentials than the corporate ones to log in to Brightidea’s innovation management tool, causing a loss of participation. Another challenge was that there was no standard method for how an employee was to explain their idea. They also had no defined KPIs to measure how The Garage was performing and how to improve it.
Challenges No central way to capture ideas and comments from across the organization No standard format for idea submission Low employee participation No specific KPIs to measure performance
Solution
The Solution Gvirtsman’s innovation team runs quarterly cycles for idea submission, commenting and voting. To increase participation, the team took several steps: • They took advantage of Brightidea’s design flexibility to customize the landing page so that the experience was focused and streamlined. • They implemented single sign-on (SSO), eliminating the need for additional credentials. Now when employees click on the promotional communications they are taken straight into the Brightidea innovation management platform, which has increased participation tremendously.
• They enforce the phrasing of an idea as a succinct Tweet as part of the submission template.
• They assign default images to ideas according to category so that the landing page is visually appealing even if users don’t upload photos with their submissions. In addition to the marketing efforts, they have become a company with a culture of innovation focused on continuous improvement. Gvirtsman’s team began to measure statistics very diligently. They defined a set of KPIs around
Implemented Brightidea as a streamlined way to capture ideas Created a highly customized, engaging interface Wrapped program with strong marketing and motivational tools Leveraged Brightidea’s metrics for tracking and continuous improvement
Results (By Quarter) 80 ideas captured 750 comments 700 unique voters 15 ideas moved to incubation stage 3+ ideas moved to seed stage or implementation Real revenue-generating products being developed from program
CASE STUDY
HP Software
the number of ideas submitted, the number of votes and comments, and the participation rate. Every month the team reviews the Brightidea statistics and makes important decisions based on this data.
and evaluated and has created a streamlined, intuitive and engaging user experience that is easily customized for various business needs worldwide. Use of Brightidea’s points tracking along with other motivational techniques has helped spur employee contribution. HP Software’s Executive Vice President and the entire leadership team are openly and enthusiastically endorsing the program. This top-down promotion has been key to the innovation program’s successful adoption, and now one-third of HP Software’s entire workforce is actively engaged in the innovation program. Specific quarterly KPI results per quarterly cycle include:
The idea submission structure they instituted is based on Lean Startup, which asks the idea submitter: What problem are you solving? What is your target market? Why should HP do this? Why should HP do this now? This gives the team a level of standardization that improves idea quality. To encourage participation the team uses eye-catching visuals as well as motivational tools like a points system and raffles. This brings in a lot of ideas, which are voted and commented on. Each quarter, the top ideas move forward to an incubation phase and the rest are archived. To help foster a culture of innovation and keep participants engaged, employees whose ideas were not selected are encouraged to enhance their idea and resubmit it for the next cycle. Innovation coaches are distributed across the company to coach employees on developing their nascent ideas into mature ideas with maximum revenue potential. This perception of ideation as an ongoing conversation rather than a competition is one of the program’s key aspects.
The Results The Brightidea innovation platform has been extremely valuable as a central, global repository for capturing and collaborating on employee ideas. Gvirtsman’s team has been able to standardize how ideas are formulated
• 80 ideas captured
• About 750 comments
• Around 700 unique voters
Over the past 3½ years, dozens of ideas have either moved into production, are in the process of moving to production, or have progressed to seed stage (funded). Every quarter HP Software is consistently incubating around 15 ideas, of which three or more move to the innovation council and seed stage or straight to the line of business for implementation. Tangible projects that have resulted from Gvirtsman’s innovation program include:
The flexibility of Brightidea has been instrumental in helping us customize and evolve our program. We could not have achieved our success with an inflexible vanilla product.
Ahi Gvirtsman, Head of Innovation
• Service Manager Smart Analytics – which leverages Big Data technology on top of an existing HP product that has a customer base of thousands.
• HP Threat Central – a central repository where corporations can share security data. • Predictive Analytics Distributed R – a technical breakthrough that allows companies to run big data queries over parallel servers. Brightidea continues to be a very effective and powerful innovation management tool for HP Software. As Gvirtsman summarizes: “The flexibility of Brightidea has been instrumental to helping us customize and evolve our program. We could never have achieved our success with an inflexible vanilla product.”
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