The Social Media MBA in Practice: An Essential Collection of Inspirational Case Studies to Influence your Social Media Strategy

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Electrolux – Internal Crowdsourcing

Want a Few Thousand Ideas? Ask Your Employees

Household appliance group Electrolux engaged 40 per cent of their white-collar employees in a global, 72-hour ideation event. The result was a step forward on their journey towards becoming a world-class, market-driven consumer innovation company.

Executive summary

Overview

The Electrolux Group's innovation ambition is to create new products consumers prefer and to do it faster than the competition. One way for a large, global company to make size a virtue instead of an obstacle to increasing speed is to create cross-regional, cross-functional connections between employees and engage them in the ideation challenge.

Key findings

• Employee passion and creativity can be effectively unleashed in the crowdsourcing environment. The benefits include accelerating the innovation pipeline of the company and creating a lasting impact on corporate culture by making it more highly engaging, inspiring, collaborative and entrepreneurial. These changes to the culture could potentially lead to innovations in all functions, not just product development.
• When an online ideation session is properly constructed, it is possible to get a high level of engagement. Electrolux inspired more than 7,200 employees (out of a target audience of 18,000) to contribute more than 3,500 ideas, 14,000 comments and 20,000 votes in ...