Challenge

This technology conglomerate innovation teams’ mission is to create a culture of innovation across the organization by supporting internal business units with a variety of services. As a remote and globally distributed team without a physical presence, they needed to find an engaging, boots on the ground way to capture data that would give them insights into employee innovation capabilities and awareness. Furthermore, these insights would allow the team to directly provide valuable feedback to leadership and catalyze change by creating tailored innovation services that would support teams on their innovation journey.

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Outcome

Mapping the fabric of Innovation  

Through a multitude of stakeholder interviews, we discovered what data points were essential in understanding more about the level of the organizations’ employee innovation capabilities and awareness. Based on this understanding, we co-created a strategy that would include a two-pronged approach with both a digital and physical engagement component.  

To create engagement we needed a powerful story, and nothing fuels curiosity more than the interest to learn more about yourself. We asked employees to participate in mapping the fabric of innovation within the organization by answering a series of targeted questions that would allow them to find out what innovation personality they are, adding their own thread to the fabric as they answered the questions. We built out 4 different personalities based on academic principles of innovation and creative thinking – linking the characters to a recommendation of services.

Strategically shipped around the world to offices in London, San Jose and Bangalore, three 11 foot interactive displays engaged employees through both a physical and an app based activity. While the tactile component built curiosity and acted as free advertisement in public places such as the cantina, data points were collected digitally from participants through the corresponding digital application.

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Process

Research

Ideation

Prototyping (Display and app)

Testing Shipping of Displays around the world

Data collection and insights

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