Siemens is one of the big global companies that puts lots of efforts into their innovation efforts and they have lots of initiatives on open innovation, co-creation and co-ideation within the company itself or even with external partners.
At a recent conference organized by the Danish open innovation portal, Innosite, I got a chance to listen to some great insights by Christoph Krois, who is one of the innovation leaders at Siemens Corporate Technology.
Krois has allowed the sharing of his presentation, which you can download here: Open Co-Ideation at Siemens
You can go straight to the presentation, but as a starter, I have listed some of the highlights below.
Changing demands, typical challenges:
Krois started his presentation by stating that changing demands in the business worlds ask for new approaches and he listed these typical challenges at Siemens:
• need for matured ideas
• collaboration
• higher efficiency of innovation process
• cost pressure
• faster time to market
• reduce non-conformance cost
• need for higher decision acceptance
One of the solutions for addressing this at Siemens is an initiative called Open Co-Innovation at Siemens. The methodology help bring in solutions based on these elements:
• highly integrative and efficient Ideation & maturation on Web2.0 platform
• fast Idea maturation
• direct feedback
• fully transparent
• direct & fast community prioritization through peer rating and expert assessment
• create awareness
• motivate & engage employees
(swarm intelligence)
• flexible collaboration
The principles of the co-ideation process at Siemens
• new ideas by community (guided within pre-defined framework)
• idea discussion and maturation (supported by expert moderators)
• pre-selection (through community and expert rating)
• validation (supported by expert moderators)
• final selection of winner ideas (by high level management jury)
• implementation (mandatory for success)
The open co-ideation process has taken place at Siemens since 2009 and it is build around a methodology based on:
• development of user stories and customer insights
• validation of existing data-driven service business ideas
• development of new data-driven business opportunities (high level)
• common description of ideas based on Business Model Framework methodology
• community idea generation, evaluation, discussion and maturation
The three main use cases for internal co-ideation events at Siemens are:
1) discuss a hot topic and develop business ideas
2) engage employees in the regions
3) let experts co-create the future
While closing his presentation, Krois shared these success factors:
• alignment of owner, topic and approach with strategy
• senior management buy-in to visibly support OCI participation
• expectation management
• topic of interest for employees and strategic importance for management
• methodological support
• content expert project responsibility
• continuous personal coaching of moderators
• in depth, continuous Community Management
•best practice sharing
Why not check out the presentation yourself? You might also enjoy this article: Knowledge Sharing Culture at Siemens
