As an example, we were able to do a challenge on what affordable housing might look like in Northern California. This is a significant issue for all, but it also impacts our employees ability to find affordable housing near some of our hospitals and care sites, particularly in the Bay Area. We were able to engage a huge subset of our organization and source different ideas on what we might be able to do to address affordable housing. One of the ideas was partnering with an Airbnb or different rental site to enable our nurses to stay closer to where they work, instead of traveling (in extreme cases) maybe three hours a day, one way. Enabling them to stay closer to where they work might improve their work satisfaction, but it could also will make sure that our clinicians are sharp so they can deliver the best possible patient care for the patients we are serving.

This came all the way to the forefront using Spigit. And then, of course, COVID-19 happened and this is something that was accelerated. We were able to stand this up and pilot it in a very short amount of time. It all began with doing a challenge on the Spigit platform.

In terms of prioritizing and selecting the best ideas, what is important is that it helps leverage the wisdom of the crowd. From our standpoint, that crowd is our employees. It has given our senior leaders a chance to hear from our employees in a way that wouldn't be as easy to hear without a technology like this. It is a really good mechanism for our leaders to really understand the pulse of what's happening in our operations.

Finally, it has increased innovation efficiency and helped us to cut our time to market for new ideas. We have learned that the tool is great at giving us real-time, pulse feedback on how ideas may be, or are being, perceived. This has given our teams time back that might have been wasted if we had rolled something out and then realized that there were problems or issues we should have considered. In a sense, we were getting those issues addressed months ahead of time. So it has definitely saved on time to market.

We ran our first challenge back in January 2019. The first seven projects that we selected as winning projects have moved forward significantly. Some of those are completed and others are still in progress. In terms of just communicating out, advertising those stories, and talking about them, this has helped build engagement and a culture around innovation. It has created some excitement that there is a new way for people to collaborate.

The voting is one way in terms of how the solution’s functionality helps us to prioritize and select the best ideas. E.g., we use the number of views on an idea, the number of votes, and the number of comments that an idea gets. We're using this for most for our challenges which are expert reviews. This is where we're gathering experts who do a simple scoring mechanism. The final stage is where we use a pairwise. This is the top ideas, usually 15 ideas, then do a pairwise with the organization. We tend to have lower participation by this point but we still find we're getting enough people to statistically get a good representation. So far, so good with the way ideas are prioritized.

We are doing well on the front-end of the workflow with the collection and prioritizing of ideas. We are still figuring out how to get the execution of the Okta top ideas more highlighted or focused. This part of the workflow is still something we're working on.

Spigit Planview is a big part of how our company is trying to promote and foster a culture of innovation. It's helping with changing the norms and making coworkers feel more empowered to suggest solutions for all sorts of problems they face day-to-day. When they do it successfully through a challenge, they can see how that can translate into results and into appreciation from their leadership, and they can take that mentality to all aspects of their work.

At this point we've had hundreds of ideas submitted, largely from the business segments, and they have implemented more than 100 of those ideas. The challenge winners or challenge ideas — sometimes they weren't declared winners — that have been implemented have resulted in customer value, new revenue, or cost savings that are real to our customers and to us as a company.

We have a portfolio project that we manage, and investments that we manage, and R&D that we manage. This is a little bit different than that, although sometimes it seeds in. The biggest thing is that this is a central part of our cultural goals and objectives. Using crowdsourced ideation and Spigit is a big way for us to achieve the cultural goals we have.

In terms of increased employee survey scores in our organization as a result of using the solution, we have had improved engagement scores that we can track through it and compare coworkers who have gone through a challenge with those who haven't. There tends to be an increase in both innovation in surveys that we've done and in employee satisfaction in generic components that we're looking at. It's a little bit tough to scientifically declare that type of thing causally, but we do have some good evidence to suggest that it has been a factor in improving metrics. There are several ways we measure it, but the positive satisfaction increase is around five to 10 percent on average. For example, a survey that had a 70 percent positive score might have something like 77 percent in the next year. Some of those small increases actually are pretty meaningful.

If we take a broader perspective, beyond our immediate team — because we have not done very many challenges ourselves — there has been an increase in innovation in general among our internal customers who are using Spigit. We have seen that the pace of project startup, funding, and completion is much faster for things that are proposed in or are winning these challenges; sometimes four to five times faster.

We just did a Shark Tank event based off our top five ideations for a challenge called "Kill a Ridiculous Rule". With those top five ideations, we were able to uncover that there are colleagues who like to be able to email clients. So, we were able to put together a campaign and templates that they can use to email. It's helped in a sense that more companies are using email, text, and different apps to communicate because it's just faster. So, is helped in a sense of efficiency for now. 

The biggest impact been the engagement. We've exceeded our goals as far as participation goes. Even if we haven't had a lot of people submit ideas, we've had people participate in the voting, commenting, and supporting of their colleagues.

I have to share with you about the first challenge that we ever ran into. It was around the do it yourself part of our business. We are a big retailer. We have a commercial side as well as the do it yourself side. The first challenge was surrounding that experience for our customers, and the ideas came from our store team members. Everybody was welcome to participate from corporate, and from the supply chain as well. Interestingly enough, the individuals who came up with the idea were a part-time driver and a store associate. Together, they formed the team. The idea that they provided was a way for us to not only improve the customer's experience but also to improve our team members' knowledge about the parts that we do sell and how we can make sure that in the long run we are able to provide a way for team members to continue learning, continue growing, and stay with the company.

That was last year that we collected the idea, and there were some back-end software things that we needed to develop. About a year later, we just rolled it out to all our stores, and we're already noticing very quick results in team members being able to increase the units per transaction. On our side, we're still waiting on getting full results. It hasn't been a full quarter yet since we rolled it out, but we're already seeing some positive things. We're hoping to see really what the big dollar amount is for increased units per transaction. For this project overall, we have seen ROI.

The biggest impact of using Planview would be that we were able to bridge the silos which existed between a lot of different departments or even locations. We have a very large team member base of about 75,000 employees across various different parts of the country. Being able to bridge that gap and have a way for everybody to communicate together to collaborate together, that was a first for our organization. That's been one of the most valuable things that we've seen. We also see those results in our organizational health survey as well. Our team members truly feel like this is a very inclusive, innovative company. That's been beneficial.

It increases the omnichannel for communication. Therefore, it is another way for people to interface where they may not do so otherwise. It's a good communication tool within our organization.

The solution enables us to consolidate duplicate responses from employees. If someone identifies a system enhancement, they'll replace that. For example, if there isn't an established workaround or we haven't been able to write a strong value statement because it isn't something worth pulling resources to fix, we will see the idea posted by other people. I think they are hoping that we will increase its visibility. Therefore, it is really easy to group those ideas, and we can say, "Please refer to this idea that was posted earlier in January. Here's the reason that it is not moving forward." 

We recently had one of these requests where somebody submitted an idea on a software system that is sunsetting. It's going to be replaced. We responded, "We understand that that's a great idea, but we're not going to implement anything today. However, we will take that input and insight from you and give that to the team who is building out the new platform." If that's not something the new software can solve for, perhaps they can build that into the code or they can look into that, fixing it on a future platform.

We haven't really had an idea which has come through the platform that has gone full scale to market.

The organizational improvement is more qualitative. We are able to ask a large number of people for input, easily gather that input, and then make sense of it. We previously didn't have a way to do that. Now, we have it. 

This is more of a support to an innovation program. It is just a tool. For example, we did some things similar in the past, but it was with smaller groups of people and usually in-person. Or, it just had limited ways for getting, storing, and sharing the information. This solution enables a broader audience to participate. 

It has increased application efficiency. This solution helps on the front-end, increasing efficiency. We are 200 percent more effective.

The solution enables us to consolidate duplicate responses from employees. By combining ideas, it minimizes confusion. People are able to group several ideas together. While this doesn't reduce overhead, it eliminates confusion.

The sharing of ideas among users often helps make the idea-review process for our consultant team much more efficient because we can review ideas even before the end of an innovation initiative or challenge. A lot of the work is done on the platform at the front end.

Also, a platform like Spigit during COVID times, with the crowdsourcing feature and the engagement, is able to bring people together virtually and to collaborate in a fun and productive way. As organizations look for tools for the "new normal" where people are working remotely all the time, an innovation platform like Spigit can be a tool that makes it easy for people to engage and collaborate.

It has increased innovation efficiency and has helped cut our time to market for new ideas. The platform is just a platform but there's a whole other layer to it, which is leadership buy-in and funding. But when you have leadership buy-in, Spigit can get you from: "We're going to run an initiative to solve these pain points," to "Here are the top ideas that we're actually going to put on a roadmap," and it can do so much quicker than any other way of doing it within an organization. In that sense, Spigit could save you months or even years. We've run challenges and have found ideas or solutions within six to eight weeks for things that might otherwise have taken a whole year or more. In a company that is built on roadmaps, oftentimes there is not a lot of leeway for innovations and they will put a good idea on next year's roadmap.