Bonn, March 30th 2011 – A decisive factor for the success of innovation management is the motivation of every single employee to make a purposeful contribution to the innovation process. With this in mind, HYPE, a leading provider of idea and innovation management solutions, has developed a new function for visualizing employee reputation: innovative employees are rewarded for their involvement in generating and evaluating new ideas using virtual credits, which indicate their competence and make it perceptible throughout the company. The overall result, as shown in the findings of the test phase, is that employees are permanently motivated to contribute to the innovation process.
The uniqueness of the function lies in its flexibility and transparency for the innovation manager, who can adjust the idea management software, HypeIMT, according to his own individual requirements and those of the various phases of the innovation process. Put briefly: the innovation manager can decide what will lead to a rise or fall in the reputation of the employees.
Reputation - How it works:
Companies use HypeIMT, in order to generate ideas systematically and to accelerate the process of arriving at marketable, innovative products. HypeIMT detects and evaluates the activity of employees who participate in the innovation process. The users receive virtual credits to go towards their so-called reputation level, which is made up of (a) the activity of the employees, or, in other words, their general interest and involvement in ideas put forward by others, as well as the submission of their own ideas and (b) the success of their own ideas, for example, if these are called up, commented on, evaluated or even implemented by their colleagues.
From virtual to real credit
The visualization of reputation calls on the employees to embrace the competition sportingly and to climb the internal ranking tables. The employees' profile pictures are marked with icons, which directly signify to each participant whether the colleague has a high reputation or is a beginner. Whenever a user profile is called up, participants can see the reputation level the employee has achieved to date. It is also possible to call up a list of top performers at any time. In this respect, the function can also be used as a basis for the presentation of awards – for example, in order to regularly select the "Innovator of the Month" and to present the employee with a predetermined prize.
Sustained and qualified involvement
Anyone who is not continually active loses a small part of their reputation every workday. This is to prevent a user from being intensively involved on one day, only to then take it easy for weeks on end. However, this is not difficult for employees to counteract; they simply have to keep contributing, again and again. When this succeeds, the reward for employees is the visible growth of their reputation and, for the innovation manager, the lively participation. In this respect, however, activity for activity's sake is not enough: repeatedly logging in and out, for example, will not lead to an increase in reputation.
Reputation therefore provides the innovation manager with clear indicators regarding the innovation potential of the employees. He can use the function to select suitable people for participation on special projects and to conduct targeted control of innovation processes.
What's new?
Reputation functions are already in use in the field of social media or in online shops, in order to give ratings for users, contributions or products. Now, for the first time, HYPE offers the opportunity to integrate finely tuned and flexibly controllable employee reputation into idea management. In doing so, the innovation manager is free to decide how various criteria influence reputation and in what way the reputation level is visualized. The software adapts itself to the desires and demands of the customer, and not vice versa.
