The caliber of any organization – as well as its reputation and ability to grow – is directly tied to its aptitude for innovation, particularly in impacted and highly competitive markets such as health care, engineering, transportation, and education.
Though there’s a proven track record of success for companies that use crowdsourcing and open innovation to drive creative, goal-driven, and collaborative ideation, the practice remains widely untapped as a viable resource. Enterprises are typically hesitant for one of two reasons: either they’re uncomfortable inviting untested expertise into their innovation process, or they’re unclear on how to effectively manage the generation and capture of disparate ideation at such a large scale.
The Siemens Solution
However, a business cannot depend on serendipity alone. Process and structure are crucial components of a properly executed innovation program, alongside critical – but largely uncommon – factors, such as transparency, flattened hierarchies, and interdepartmental or customer-driven collaboration.
Siemens Road and City Mobility, a global company based in Germany, recently launched their Mobility IDEA (Improving Design and Engineering for All) Contest, in order to leverage widespread open innovation to find solutions to some of the most difficult challenges currently facing the traffic industry.
The contest encourages the general public, as well as university students, to submit innovative ideas that can help solve a selection of common, longstanding transportation challenges. The program, enabled by Mindjet’s powerful SpigitEngage enterprise innovation management software, is giving the team at Siemens the opportunity to leverage the knowledge and perspectives of a dedicated, global group of relevant industry thought leaders – as well as students and other interested people with great, novel ideas.
“We’re thrilled that Siemens is executing this necessary initiative using Mindjet’s SpigitEngage software,” says Kevin Cochrane, Chief Marketing Officer at Mindjet. “We believe that Siemens is in an excellent position to use this program and platform to truly help advance today’s traffic systems and bring clarity to issues that really matter to the people who are most affected by them.”
IDEA Submissions and Guidelines
The contest is open now, and will run through Sunday, November 16th. Finalists will be announced on Friday, December 12th. Ideas can be submitted through the IDEA Contest website, where users are able to provide their own ideas, offer suggestions to existing submissions, comment and vote on their favorites, and share concepts and discussions through social media.
Participants can enter ideas for one of five, problematic traffic-related situations, including connected technologies, disaster response and resilience, environmental impact, urban growth, and parking. Through this incredible example of open innovation at work, we fully expect the contest to be a success that resonates throughout the entire transportation industry, and that will attract and inspire the creative ideation of the global crowd.
To learn more about the Siemens Mobility IDEA Contest, read the press release, check out their blog, or visit the challenge hub.
For more information about Mindjet’s SpigitEngage innovation platform, click here.
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