A platform where the more than 71,000 employees of the 40 countries where Enel is present can propose and discuss innovative ideas to improve the company
The crowdsourcing made in Enel, the company that innovates with the direct contribution of its employees. The Eidos Market platform, presented on February 20, targets the initiative, imagination and skills of those who work in the Group, using digital as a tool to create a real internal innovation network, open to the more than 71,000 employees and extended across the 40 countries in which the Group operates.
The examples of large companies that use crowdsourcing are increasingly numerous. From the Coca Cola’s Global shapers community to Nokia’s DVLUP, as well as Unilever’s Open innovation programme,various multinationals are launching contests of ideas, asking partners, suppliers and individuals to pool resources to create new marketing campaigns and to improve their services or products. As regards Enel’scrowdsourcing programme, it addresses employees (IBM and Deutsche Telekom have similar projects) and is born from an experience that has already been tested within the Group.
The Eidos Market project is a model that Enel has already explored with a pilot project in Chile in2012, and then within the entire Iberia and Latin America Division. The new system is based on this experience and was then extended to the whole Group, where digital is at the service of the company’shuman and professional resources with the purpose of improving processes, quality of the work andcustomer services, thanks to a bottom-up approach.
All of Enel’s 71,000 employees play a central role in the company’s innovation process and are, asemphasised by CEO Fulvio Conti when the platform was launched, “an extraordinary source which the innovation process must necessarily tap into” in order “to create and promote a culture of innovation”.
Four challenges and a virtual stock exchange. Eidos Market paves the way to 2.0 innovation made in Enel by inviting the corporate community to propose ideas and projects on:
- Individual roles for health and safety,
- the improvement of professional performance;
- the environment;
- customer contact.
A simple and participatory system thanks to which employees build a creative process that combines the trends of social innovation and those of crowdsourcing. By accessing the Eidos Market platform, through the corporate intranet, anyone can post an innovative idea to solve the challenges proposed by the management and all the colleagues can comment on it, improve on it with their own contribution and offer an assessment.
Like a real global market of ideas, the mechanism used to assess ideas is inspired by the stock exchange, with Enel employees as investors and ideas as stock. This approach highlights the most promising ideas, which will be brought to the attention of the management, who will then decide which ones to realise.
