SPIKE Awards

American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP)

Business Challenge

Recognizing some fundamental breakdowns in the delivery of health care, the leadership of 7 national family medicine organizations initiated the Future of Family Medicine (FFM) project in 2002. The goal of the project was to renew the discipline of family medicine for the changing needs of the 21st Century patient. Based on the findings of the FFM project, the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) stepped up and assumed a leadership role in turning the recommendations into action. Part of their strategy was to form a new entity called TransforMED. And in June 2006, TransforMED launched a 24-month pilot program to test the new model advocated by the project. Once the pilot program was complete, the AAFP's TransforMED group had built a core team of experts in practice transformation and captured a portfolio of best practices, tools and methodologies. However, a challenge remained - how do you effectively distribute this knowledge and support a system-wide change impacting more than 94,700 family physicians, residents and students, across the nation?

Project Details

At the core of TransforMED's strategy for practice transformation was the implementation of a virtual social network called Delta-Exchange. Delta-Exchange, powered by IGLOO's social computing platform, is an online learning community that provides useful tools and best practices to help primary care practices transform to a new model of care. The easy-to-use, private, collaborative website enables individual practices to ask questions, share knowledge and learn from each others' experiences. Membership is paid and enables family practitioners to: • Create their own profile, post documents, images and videos • Participate in online discussions to share practical knowledge and learn from others • Access optional, private work zones for physicians, clinical staff, office staff and residency programs and ask questions to highly experienced practice facilitators • Find resources, whitepapers, forms, case studies and online seminars on a variety of relevant practice improvement topics.

Results / Improvements

Delta-Exchange is already financially viable because its operation can be sustained on subscriptions alone without corporate or philanthropic support Membership is growing fast and, in the first year of operation, 11% of AAFP's members have converted to active participants in the community and, in one year, the community has grown from 30 members to a network of over 1,200 members.

Website: http://www.delta-exchange.net

Quirky

Category Winner!

Business Challenge

An easier way to bring ideas and concepts from inventors, designers, and the public to market.

Project Details

Quirky is a social product development company. Ideas for consumer products that retail for under $150 and don’t involve integrated software are submitted, the Quirky community and team work on them, sell the product worldwide, and then share the revenue with the inventor and all influencers.

The public can submit their ideas to Quirky online for $10 per submission. Once an idea is submitted, it is included in the next product evaluation round. There are two main steps to idea selection: community evaluation and staff evaluation. Members of the Quirky community vote, rate and comment on the ideas, then the top 5 ideas move on to the Quirky staff evaluation, where they are thoroughly analyzed in design potential, marketing potential and viability. If an idea is selected to become Quirky’s next product, the designer earns 40% of the community share of revenue, approximately 12 cents for every dollar the product brings in online, and 4 cents on every dollar the product brings in at retail. But you don’t have to be an inventor to earn money through Quirky. Others can participate by earning “influence” - meaning rating ideas, voting for winning ideas, or contributing a name, logo or tagline.

Quirky shares 30% of all top line revenue brought in by direct sales on quirky.com as well as 10% of indirect retail sales with each product’s influencers.

Results / Improvements

The Quirky community has over 30,000 members and has developed over a 40 different products. One example is the PowerCurl, a clip-on cord wrap for the Apple power adapter which made over $3,000 in the first 7 days of shipping.

Congratulations to Quirky for a truly innovative business model that delivers on the promise of social product innovation.

Website: http://www.quirky.com
More Success Stories: http://www.quirky.com/learn

Amigo Energy

Business Challenge

Create a dialogue with customer audience to communicate services and promotions, while encouraging customer feedback and ideas.

Project Details

Separates their approach into 3 different social media outlets; Blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. The target segments are different for each of these channels. - Blog: Targeted to build trust and encourage the customers to come talk to the company. It asks the question of what do you expect out of your security provider, and describes how to get information or receive certain rebates. - Facebook: The content is more complicated- it is targeted towards users who are very information specific, and provides info on how electricity markets are dependent on oil prices. - Twitter: Communicates other services, promos, and what's happening internally. This allows for customer feedback and topics on how the company could be changing.

Results / Improvements

Around 26%-50% of current product initiatives use social media or social computing.

Blog: http://blog.amigoenergy.com
Facebook: http://facebook.com/AmigoEnergy
Twitter: http://twitter.com/AmigoEnergy

Corrigo

Category Winner!

Business Challenge

Corrigo provides software-as-a-service solutions for facility and field service management organizations for service management, maintenance management, service dispatch, and employee time tracking. Corrigo was challenged with creating a dialogue with their customer audience to collect ideas, feedback, and troubleshoot product issues.

Project Details

Corrigo’s Product Marketing and Management teams actively monitor pertinent key words and topics on social media to determine features and functions their target markets may need. Corrigo also created a LinkedIn Group as a community for users of their software to collaborate, network and share ideas.

Results / Improvements

As a result, 6 of their last 25 product features came from monitoring social media dialogue. In addition to reducing overall support call volume, one specific example of a change driven from the community cut call volume by over 50% on that topic.

Congratulations to Corrigo for using Web 2.0 technology to create a public forum for their customers to collaborate and provide valuable feedback.

Website: http://www.corrigo.com

Intuit

Business Challenge

Brainstorm is a web-based collaboration platform focused on workflows specific to innovation. It enables innovators to grow their ideas, build a team, and get the help needed to move the idea forward within an organization. It also gives management the tools they need to focus on the most relevant ideas for the company and then help advance those ideas.

Project Details

Ideas are developed through threaded discussion by participants and a flexible building block type interface that allows the idea to change and evolve over time. As questions are asked and information is learned, the idea can be adapted to reflect that change. Over time, the collaboration in Brainstorm starts to separate some ideas from the others. The increased visibility leads to more comments and collaboration that can get an idea over the hump from "just an idea" to "action is being taken." But, it’s not just about measuring activity or analyzing ratings. Brainstorm acknowledges the critical human element of how ideas make their way from concept to reality. Sometimes, it’s just about getting the ear of the right person, in which case Brainstorm’s simple sharing mechanism is key. Other times, it’s making key people aware of what they don’t know. That’s where following tags, people or ideas come in.

Results / Improvements

Brainstorm results at Intuit- 1,000% increase in ideation from employees; 500% increase in number of employees actively innovating; Decreased time to market for new ideas from 13 months to 5 months; 154 ideas released (range from process improvements to new offerings); Critical to the release of seven new apps now on Intuit Labs:

• ViewMyPaycheck (now has over 75,000 users)
• TimeCatcher for Android
• Notebox
• TimeCatcher for Blackberry
• Lasso
• Expense Control

Website: http://intuitbrainstorm.com/index.aspx

Kimberly-Clark

Category and People's Choice Winner!

Business Challenge

Advancing the business prospects of entrepreneurial moms in order to make their baby and toddler centric innovations more broadly available to moms everywhere while also sourcing potential innovations to feed and accelerate the Huggies(r) innovation agenda.

Project Details

Social media tools (Facebook, Twitter, and bloggers) were used to reach, teach, and enroll prospective entrepreneurial moms in the program. 485 grant applications were received. Kimberly-Clark selected 12 recipients to each receive a $15,000 to advance their business prospects as they see fit. Beyond providing business development grants, the program through the Huggies MomInspired(r) website (www.huggiesmominspired.com) delivers on other key entrepreneurial mom needs ... education on key business challenges/issues and a support community of other like moms. This is not a one time grant as Kimberly-Clark and the recipients continue to work together to identify potential, and mutually beneficial, business opportunities/relationships and work together to extend the program to more and more entrepreneurial moms. Distinct from other approaches to open innovation, the Huggies MomInspired program puts venture capital directly into the hands of moms to source game changing innovation right from the cutting edge of actual user experience. Additionally, the grants address the #1 concern of entrepreneurial moms. There are 10.6 million women-owned businesses in the U.S. according to the Center for Women's Business Research, and women are starting businesses at nearly twice the rate of men. Yet as little as three percent of all venture capital investments in the U.S. go to women-led businesses, according to Babson College research.

Results / Improvements

Twelve grants of $15,000 each have been made in this inaugural round of the program. A community of these "Inspired Moms" has formed and is journeying forward with Kimberly-Clark to expand the program and identify/develop new business opportunities for the grant recipients and Huggies(r). In addition, the "Inspired Moms" community has begun to support each other with the most knowledgeable innovators coaching, teaching, and supporting the least experienced in the group.

Congratulations to Kimberly-Clark for sourcing new innovations directly from actual user experience.

Website: http://huggiesmominspired.com

Kraft

Business Challenge

Attracting innovation from external companies and entrepreneurs in an effort to help meet Kraft's needs.

Project Details

“Innovate with Kraft” program is a new capability designed to capture unsolicited innovations whereby anyone can submit product ideas.

Results / Improvements

Kraft’s recent new product introduction, Bagel-fuls came from an unsolicited idea from a third-generation bagel maker in a niche market. The idea was a win-win for both companies: it solved some technical challenges that Kraft had faced in delivering a bagel and cheese combo, and it expanded the bagel-makers product beyond his niche. A consumer dissatisfier was the residual product that remained in the container. Now, a 24 oz "All-Out Squeeze!" container of Kraft Mayo typically makes 4 more sandwiches than the other leading brand. Kraft then added improvements to run on our lines at high speed. This is a great example of turning a consumer quality concern into an opportunity and levering open innovation to find the solution.

Website: http://brands.kraftfoods.com/innovatewithkraft