Data from 3.5M Employees Shows How Innovation Really Works
Data From 3.5 Million Employees Shows How Innovation Really Works
Juan Díaz-Faes for HBRThe variables that make for a successful innovation program are independent of whether the company is seeking disruptive or incremental innovations. It doesn’t matter whether they’re asking for process or product innovation, what industry the company is in, or even, for the most part, whether the company is large or small. That’s according to researchers who analyzed five years of data from 154 public companies covering over 3.5 million employees that have used an idea management system called Spigit. After reviewing dozens of variables that could potentially affect ideation, they identified four that drove the ideation rate: the number of participants, the number of ideas, the number of people evaluating the ideas, and the diversity of the participants. More ideas from more different kinds of people made for stronger innovation pipelines.
 
 Sales and marketing were once disciplines ruled by emotions. But somewhere along the way, we recognized that they were based on definable pipelines and applied technology to manage those pipelines. Today you can put a corporate dashboard in place to manage them and tweak the settings to try to boost your results.