This year, IdeaScale (an innovation management platform) launched the Innovation Awards. There were five categories and five winners and each of the winners was outstanding in some level (whether it was an outstanding engagement strategy or a remarkable savings story).

Nestled among the narratives they shared were some gems of knowledge and some lessons learned that could help other organizations when enacting new crowdsourcing or open innovation campaigns.

• Don’t be afraid to re-tool your initial plan.

  Both with regard to your innovation initiative and your engagement strategy. This point epitomizes the whole idea of crowdsourcing and innovation. Sometimes adaptation and tweaking are necessary to best suit your network members. And sometimes you realize that plans that sounded good in theory do not work in practice. Being open to change and improvement leads to better and more efficient results.

• Get network members pumped for the sharing and evaluation of ideas.

  In whatever way you decide to do this – whether it be communications promoting the campaign before it starts or changing job descriptions to help reflect the new mindset of collaboration – get your network stoked about the voice and choice they will be afforded. Perhaps you even have folks who have been waiting to share some awesome cost- or time-saving ideas. Community members are more excited about changes to which they’ve given input.

• Crowdsourcing of ideas leads to more organization efficiency and saved dollars.

  This is not a new idea; however, the winning organizations all expressed how much better off they were as a result of their crowdsourcing efforts. For some, this was shown in saved dollars (and a fair number of saved dollars at that). For others, it was an increase in engagement and enthusiasm among their staff. A happy staff equals greater productivity.

• Have a process in place for dealing with the inevitable flood of ideas.

  People will want to share. All of the ideas may be phenomenal, but even if that is the case, it’s probably not realistically feasible for your organization to implement them all. Even those that are most popular might not be practical or possible, so it’s important to have a structure for categorization and refinement of ideas.

Also, it’s never a bad idea to incentivize your community members with branded swag items to promote participation. Everybody loves swag.

For more in-depth information, the winners shared their best practices in a document that is downloadable so that others can replicate some of their most successful tactics.

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