Harnessing Employee Innovation in Idea Management Platforms: Lessons from Allianz UK Forthcoming in MIS Quarterly Executive

Idea management platforms enable firms to generate pools of ideas and connect employees to large number of colleagues. Although these platforms hold the potential to support employee innovation, managers face considerable difficulties when it comes to deploying them in a way that generates business value. This article describes Allianz UK’s ten-year initiative to tap into its employees’ ideas and develop a distributedinnovation capability. We identify challenges the firm faced and describe how leaders addressed them. Based on insights gained from Allianz UK, we provide recommendations for deriving value from idea management platforms at other organizations. IDEA MANAGEMENT PLATFORMS SUPPORT DISTRIBUTED INNOVATION A recent survey, by global consulting firm PWC, finds that innovation is the number one priority of CEOs. Firms such as Siemens, Citibank, SAP, IBM, and Shell have successfully reached out to employees, customers, and other business partners for valuable and innovative ideas. These efforts reflect a broader trend, in which companies seek to become more flexible and adaptive by “crowdsourcing” or “distributing” innovation. The experiences of these and other distributed innovation pioneers yield 1 We would like to thank Allianz UK for its support and help with this research. Specially, we acknowledge the support of Surinder Kooner head of innovation, Robin Stagg, innovation manager and Harvey Wade former innovation manager at Allianz UK and program innovation manager at Cisco. We also thank the editors and three anonymous reviewers for their excellent advice. Financial support was provided by the JPA program of the FNEGE. 2 See Shelton and Percival “Unleashing the Power of Innovation,” PWC Report, 2015, available at http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/innovationsurvey/ 3 Crowdsourcing is touted as a transformative use of IT for innovation; see Benbya, H. and Van Alstyne, M. “How to find Answers Within Your Company,” MIT Sloan Management Review (52:2), 2011, pp. 65-75, and Afuah, A. and Tucci, C. “Crowdsourcing as a Solution to Distant Search,” Academy of Management Review (37:3), 2012, pp.355-375.