We had a number of internal programs, none of which we thought were optimal for our use case. This is the first crowdsourcing platform that we have engaged with.

Spigit seemed like the most polished program that was really focused on taking an idea from an employee throughout the system and getting it in front of the right stakeholder. It uses the strength of its technology to really help bubble up ideas so that our senior leaders have visibility, where they wouldn't necessarily have had visibility before.

Other than SharePoint sites and internal databases, we didn't use other innovation management tools before Spigit. 

Spigit has increased innovation efficiency and helped us to cut our time-to-market for new ideas. We weren't proactively managing ideas and the idea workflow prior to this solution. So, it's been very useful so far. Before we had Spigit, we had people managing ideas within their own departments using their own databases. They would sit down in teams and have meetings to collect ideas. It has sped up areas in which we run challenges. Though, there are a lot of areas where we haven't run challenges or used the tool.

We didn't have a tool as such. There were people who used a generic suggestion box or tried to have some sort of business case or ideation-type sessions or goals, but never through a structured software solution. That aspect is definitely new for us. The need and the desire to do these types of things is certainly not new, but we haven't had anything equivalent to this.

With my company, we have different divisions. One of our divisions is already using the platform. They saw a lot of success from it. So, my VP used to be in that division. Both my senior VP and my other VP thought it was a huge success and that the platform was worth it, so they wanted to bring it over to our division.

This was brand new. We were looking into several other options as well. Internal, it was just manpower solutions, then other cloud sourcing platforms as well. Overall, after seeing all the capabilities that Spigit allows, especially with the back-end analysis, that was a very key determining factor for us. Also, the amount of hands-on support that we have on demand pretty much was another determining factor in being able to make the partnership with Spigit.

Choosing Spigit was mainly because we want to make sure that the program was scalable. Since we do have a large number of team members, we didn't want to have just a random Excel spreadsheet, or something, that was very manual and tedious. Also, when we started the program, we didn't have a full-time team member who was dedicated to this. Everybody was volunteering their time. So, we needed to make sure that this was something that was easy to automate and we had a way to continue to scaling it out to include as many team members as possible.

This is our first implementation of this type of solution.