Idea Street

Executive Summary

Idea Street is an online ideas-management platform that encourages employees to share their innovative ideas for change with a community of likeminded colleagues, and work with those colleagues to help make their ideas a reality.

Project Detail

Idea Street is an online ideas-management platform that encourages employees to share their innovative ideas for change with a community of likeminded colleagues, and work with those colleagues to help make their ideas a reality.

Instead of submitting an idea to a closed suggestion box, like a typical staff suggestion scheme, Idea Street puts ideas out in the open, so that other people within an organization can vote and comment on the suggestions of others.

In this way ideas can be refined by the collective expertise within the community and the most promising suggestions can be brought to the attention of relevant decision makers.

Idea Street encourages employees of all grades, roles and locations across an organisation to take part in what becomes essentially a decentralised innovation process. Staff are free to submit ideas on anything that may improve their day to day working lives, how their organization operates or serves its customers, stakeholders or suppliers.

It is often front-line employees, who are closest to the customers and the work of delivering products and services, that have some of the freshest ideas and insights. Idea Street seeks to introduce a mechanism for their ideas, insights and innovative approaches to problems to be captured and properly evaluated.

Additionally, as front-line staff are sometimes unfamiliar with the high level strategy and business plan of the organization, their ideas for change may not be adequately framed. Idea Street allows for the setting of broad corporate challenges in order to align the employees’ efforts with major strategic goals, encouraging quick and effective action toward these goals.

Approach taken

Resources and skills used