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 the crowdsourcing solution, including an opportunity to better market and promote it to increase participation; but putting these plans into action wasn’t easy. The team initially faced some challenges when implementing the platform including:

1. Employees needed to use a separate set of credentials to log in, which caused a loss of participation.
2. There was no standard method for how an employee was to explain their idea.
3. They had no specific KPIs to measure how ‘The Garage’ was performing or how to improve it.

The Solution

Gvirtsman’s innovation team decided to run quarterly cycles for idea submission, commenting and voting. To increase participation, the team customized the Brightidea landing page and implemented single sign-on (SSO).

In addition, Gvirtsman’s team began to measure statistics very diligently, defining a set of KPIs around 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.

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 and evaluated and has created a streamlined, intuitive and engaging user experience that is easily customized for various business needs worldwide.

The Results

Over the past 5 years, dozens of ideas have either moved into production, are in the process of moving to production, or have progressed to seed stage (funded). 113 total innovation initiatives have been run in The Garage, engaging over 31,000 participants across the corporation. Implemented projects include: Service Manager Smart Analytics, HP Threat Central, and Predictive Analytics Distributed R.

After many years of using Brightidea, it continues to be a very effective and powerful innovation management tool for HP Software to stay ahead of the industry.