Crowd ideation at Novozymes to enable innovation and new product development

The opportunity

Novozymes has more than 1,000 R&D employees working worldwide. The company tested crowd ideation as a solution to enable better knowledge transfer, problem-solving, and idea-sharing across otherwise siloed structures and hierarchies. The priority was to speed up the process of new product development across the organization.

The project approach

The crowd ideation project was launched in 2014. The project took a competition format, where a number of staff members could propose ideas, but also take part in screening incoming ideas. Participants submitted proposals and comments for screening during a two-week period. The ideas were filtered (“screened”) on a set of parameters, such as technical feasibility, originality, resource requirement, etc.

The outcome

• Within a period of 1 month, the original campaign generated a radical innovation that opened up for an entirely new enzyme application.
• The project was so successful that the initiative was scaled to the entire organization.
• +30 campaigns were run across Europe, China, Japan, and the US.
• +2,000 ideas of which many were operationalized into commercial products, patents, and new business strategies.
  

Source

Lauto G., Valentin F., Hatzack F., Carlsen M., ” Managing Front-End Innovation through Idea Markets at Novozymes”

https://research.cbs.dk/da/publications/managing-front-end-innovation-through-idea-markets-at-novozymes-i