Spigit
Technology Drives Innovative Culture

Innovation is one of the hottest, most talked about disciplines today. It’s the key to a company’s long-term success. But to drive innovation, really good ideas must be discovered. Unfortunately, the traditional method is high in risk, low in probability of success, and often slow. In fact, the traditional method cannot possibly match the speed of competition today. It used to be nearly impossible to harness the collective intelligence of an organization’s workforce so they could identify innovative ideas at scale. Now technology is making not only capturing ideas easy, it is also surfacing the best ideas automatically. By gaining insight from those closest to the customer—the employees—discovering ideas for new products, better customer experiences, cost-saving measures becomes easier.

Spigit provides the Ideation Management software to facilitate that type of discovery on an enterprise scale.

Spigit’s software enables effective ideation and collaboration throughout an organization’s workforce by enabling them to participate in the process through an engaging interface where they input ideas, vote on others’ ideas, and collaborate together. But just as importantly, Spigit helps business leaders make the right decisions with a way to track, manage, and evaluate the ideas to determine their relevance and feasibility—as well as archive the data for future reference. Simply put, Spigit helps executives invest in better projects and avoid missed opportunities. The key differentiator for Spigit is their ability to do it at scale, i.e., across any number of employees, geographic locations, technology infrastructure, and security requirements. “Spigit provides a technology platform that integrates behavioral science with their thirteen patented data algorithms that allow large groups of people to engage simultaneously in a challenge, submit ideas to address that challenge, vote on submitted ideas, iterate the ideas, and filter the best ideas based on the crowd’s participation up to the next stage of evaluation,” explains Scott Raskin, CEO, Spigit.

You can't really do innovation on a large scale without technology-it would just be a very big suggestion box

The time allotted to the crowd or community to evaluate new ideas can also be limited to create a contest and maintain momentum. Typically, ideas that have been voted through the initial discovery phase are moved into an expert review process where other types of criteria are applied to the ideas such as relevance to business goals, feasibility, potential costs, and potential return on investment. When an idea has been evaluated through discovery and relevance and qualified, it is returned to the crowd for another phase of crowdsourcing evaluation and the cycle repeats until the idea has been sufficiently refined for executive submission. And throughout this process, all activity is documented and saved within Spigit as a record of the process and an archive which can be mined for future ideas. The iterative cycle of crowdsourcing and expert evaluation supported by automated management, which includes full documentation and retention, is the beauty of the Spigit’s value proposition.

Spigit is used by over 100 Fortune 500 companies and has been put to the test by over 500 large enterprises and 6.5 million users. Their security policies are modeled on ISO 27002 and information security guidelines with full encryption for data at rest. Six data centers globally ensure that no two customers’ data is ever commingled—each customer’s data is independent—and they have passed the most stringent security tests from customers all over the world. In fact, Spigit’s ability to scale with their customers is almost seamless, integrating with their security and employee directory and eliminating the need for users to have separate logins into the Spigit site. Everything is integrated into their client’s infrastructure using their own security profile and information on their employees.

An example of Spigit’s ability to scale is found in their work with Citibank. Citi deployed Spigit to 240,000 employees across 97 countries because they needed an ideation management system that could pass stringent security requirements, scale across the business, and make it easy for people to share and collaborate.

Citi’s first challenge to the workforce was no less than “what do you see as the future of banking for Citibank?” A key goal was engagement—and over 46,000 employees in diverse backgrounds, diverse geographies, and diverse areas of the business actively participated in this first challenge resulting in submission of over 2,000 ideas. More importantly, these were the people interacting with customers and prospects daily and the high engagement really shifted the corporate culture to one of participation and engagement to help drive innovation. Several of the 2,000+ ideas made the cut all the way through the process and were deployed to customers.

Spigit has numerous customers in the banking and insurance industries. Based on their recent analysis, Spigit found that trends affecting these industries can be summarized into five key areas: increasing employee engagement, streamlining processes, customer experience, identifying new markets and business models, and developing new products and services— named by 54 percent of the participants as the largest focus and critically important to address the changing needs of the customer. For example, a recent study by Accenture found that 40 percent of 18-34-year-olds would do all banking online if they could. Another example of disruption is the impact of self-driving cars, which KPMG says will shrink the auto industry by 60 percent by 2040. “The driving question in these scenarios is how do you get insight into that looming paradigm shift now and start identifying and planning the things you need to do to either combat that future or improve products and services. Tapping into your existing employees—and even customers—and engaging them in a conversation will enable you to identify opportunities,” notes Raskin.

Creating an on-going culture of innovation is critical, but more important is surfacing the best ideas and making the right decisions. New possibilities are emerging – such as combining the processing of data with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning – that enable this to happen. Essentially, in the case of AI and machine learning, machines could be iterating on ideas and providing input while humans are iterating – and the AI element would be iterating with humans. In order to achieve a culture of innovation, surface the best ideas, and make the right decisions, technology must be used to manage the process at scale. According to Raskin, “You can't really do innovation on a large scale without technology—it would just be a very big suggestion box.”