Building an Innovation Community

Companies are increasingly using social media to open participation in innovation to nontraditional actors, both inside and outside the organization. Recently, as the fl attening of organizations and rapidly changing com-petitive environments increase the need for companies to innovate at an accelerated pace, many companies have begun exploring the use of online communities to

Allison Dahl was the community and communications manager for IdeaNet and the Employee Innovation Pro-gram at Pitney Bowes. In that role, she worked with teams across the company to track, measure, and promote in-novation results and leveraged her design background to create an engaging and sustainable employee experience. Allison also executed large-scale events such as Innova-tion Idol to showcase employee ideas and build momentum around innovation. Allison has a BFA in Communication Design from Syracuse University and is pursuing an MBA at Boston College. [email protected]

Jill Lawrence is principal of J Lawrence & Associates, a consulting practice with the mission to help companies use participation to spark innovation (from employees, customers, and suppliers) and to accelerate decisions and results. Previously, Jill was the director of acceler-ated innovation at Pitney Bowes, where she led a CEO-sponsored global innovation program to source ideas from

employees and drive collaboration across business units. She started her career as a workplace anthropologist and has 10 years of experience working with multidisci-plinary teams in design and innovation. She studied an-thropology at New York University and Smith College, where she received her BA. [email protected]

Jeff Pierce is the IdeaNet challenge architect for Pitney Bowes’s Employee Innovation Program. Jeff’s role is to guide senior leaders in engaging and collaborating with employees, applying the “wisdom of the crowds” to meet critical business objectives. Jeff has diverse experience in marketing, strategy, service design, and software devel-opment. His customer-centered research includes the marketing needs of small businesses and an ethnographic study of some of the world’s largest law fi rms. His system and software experience ranges from development of a highly secure Internet application to an interactive mul-timedia exhibit in the Smithsonian. He has a BS in Infor-mation Systems from Marymount-Fordham University and holds over 20 U.S. patents. [email protected]

OVERVIEW: Companies are increasingly using social media and other technologies to broaden the approach to idea generation and innovation both within and outside the walls of the organization. However, managers can tend to focus on installing the technology, rather than on designing a socio-technical system that can meet the orga-nization’s goals and foster authentic participation. In 2008, Pitney Bowes, a $5.4 billion provider of technology and services for mail and digital communications, initiated an effort to build an employee innovation community aimed at driving organic growth and fostering a culture of in-novation among its 30,000 employees around the globe. The Pitney Bowes Employee Innovation Program team took a human-centered approach and used primary re-search and co-creation with individuals across all levels of the organizational hierarchy to design a program that both met company objectives and satisfi ed a value propo-sition for managers and employees. The resulting pro-gram delivered measurable value inside of two years, as

BUILDING AN INNOVATION COMMUNITY Pitney Bowes’s employee innovation community demonstrates the types of results

managers can expect from a thoughtfully designed and implemented innovation

community and illustrates design principles and key success factors.

Allison Dahl , Jill Lawrence , and Jeff Pierce

DOI: 10.5437/08956308X5405006

well as providing intangible benefi ts such as employee engagement, improved internal processes, and increased customer satisfaction. The outcomes illustrate the types of results managers can expect from a thought-fully designed and implemented innovation community, and the design principles and key success factors pro-vide guidance to managers looking to initiate a similar approach.

KEY CONCEPTS : Innovation , Participatory design , User research , Action research , Social media

September—October 2011 190895-6308/11/$5.00 © 2011 Pitney Bowes, Inc.

tap the intellectual capital of their employees. These changes have prompted organizations to try different technologies for collaboration, including blogs and microblogging tools, wikis, virtual project rooms, and idea management systems. Sometimes these technologies survive and add value. Frequently, they fall into disuse.

Whether a technology persists or not depends on how well it supports the work to be done and fi ts the corporate culture. All too often, work is designed around technol-ogy rather than the other way around. To build sustain-able communities, managers need to view technology as an enabler and focus the effort on taking a participatory and iterative approach to build a system that refl ects the needs and values of stakeholders at all levels in the orga-nization. The key to success is a human-centered ap-proach. Methods from anthropology, design, and action research can help managers to design systems that take into account the way people actually work.

The Pitney Bowes Employee Innovation Community represents an example of how managers can take advan-tage of these new forms of collaboration and implement technology in a way that sticks. To create community at Pitney Bowes, the program team took deliberate steps to engage the participation of stakeholder groups across the organizational hierarchy. This involvement meant that the resulting community not only refl ected the perspec-tives of these very diverse groups, but also had shared ownership. These factors enhanced the results and sustain-ability of the program.

The Employee Innovation Program

Like many companies, Pitney Bowes realizes the best thinking can come from anywhere in the organization, and in 2008 the CEO set out a vision to engage employees in innovation, specifi cally using an innovation community. The idea surfaced in response to an internal audit of inno-vation and product-management practices that revealed barriers to innovation across the enterprise. The mission of the new Employee Innovation Program was to engage all employees in innovation, to facilitate organic growth and process improvements, and to foster a culture of in-novation through changes in behavior.

The community is called IdeaNet, and activity is struc-tured around online brainstorms, or “idea challenges,” which take place over a 3–4 week period and engage anywhere from 600 to 30,000 employees. Challenge topics are framed around real business issues and sponsored by the business leader accountable for developing and im-plementing the solution. While challenges often target spe-cifi c employee groups, a fundamental principle of the community is its emphasis on openness; therefore, most challenges are accessible to and visible by all employees who visit the site. The expectation is that contributions will come from all employees, from frontline workers to middle managers to senior leadership, including the CEO. This participation model creates situations where a manager may act in the community as an idea contributor one day, and as a challenge sponsor on another day.

In its fi rst two years post-pilot, IdeaNet received close to 3,000 ideas posted to 52 idea challenges and generated a portfolio of 874 ideas adopted by the business units, rang-ing from quick-win process improvements to concepts now in longer-term development ( Figure 1 ). While participa-tion remained steady across both years, the second year saw fewer ideas adopted by project teams, a healthy result of a more refi ned focus in selecting ideas and a more realistic evaluation of the resources available to implement ideas. As of December 2010, approximately 35 percent of those employees with daily access to the intranet had participated in IdeaNet idea challenges, about 6,500 in-dividuals. In 2011, the community’s third year, 10 chal-lenges have been launched as of June; with just over 600 ideas posted in response to these challenges, 2011 is ex-pected to match last year’s activity.

Designing an Innovation Community

From the start, the program team charged with the design and execution of the innovation community took a socio-technical systems perspective ( Bansler 1989 ). This per-spective acknowledges that technical systems do not stand apart from human systems and that technology should support work rather than work accommodating the tech-nology. Applied to the creation of the innovation com-munity, this stance meant that technology would make

Figure 1 .— Participation and idea uptake for IdeaNet idea challenges, 2009 and 2010

Research • Technology Management20

up an important enabler of the community (via the web platform), but that the most fundamental driver for sus-tainability was a design that combined an understanding of the organizational culture with the dynamics of the human work system. In other words, the team aimed for a design driven by the organization’s needs and not the technology’s features or functions. In addition, the ap-proach was underpinned by the belief that workers are experts in what they do and should therefore be involved in the design of their work. The team viewed worker participation as key to employee engagement because participation enables people to fi nd and create meaning in their work ( Weisbord 2004 ).

To get broad participation in the design process, the team used methods from the practice of participatory de-sign (PD). This approach elevates the importance of user participation in the design process, positioning the de-signer as a facilitator of a user-centered design process, rather than as a master architect of the solution. Tradi-tionally, PD is concerned with the politics of design and with the distribution of power in the workplace; PD approaches to worker participation have been able to both improve systems design (by accounting for the re-alities of work) and address issues of managerial control and workplace democracy ( Kensing and Blomberg 1998 ). As the innovation community launched, Pitney Bowes was in a time of transition. Having made a num-ber of business acquisitions in the recent past, the company had a dynamic mix of corporate cultures. Fur-thermore, the CEO’s intention to reshape the company’s culture of innovation helped to get broad participation in the design process.

The methods used in the program design process—collaborative workshops, ethnographic interviews, and interactive activities—are drawn from multiple disci-plines, particularly anthropology and design ( Brown 2009 ). The iterative nature of the design approach was inspired by PD as well as by the action research paradigm, in which the researcher makes real-world interventions, evaluates the results, and then repeats the process, taking into account the information from previous iterations (O’Brien 1998). To achieve employee and management commitment along with program sustainability, the re-search and design processes solicited participation from three levels in the organization: senior management, em-ployees, and middle management.

Involving Senior Management

The management perspective had the potential to inform the design in two important ways: (1) senior managers had a point of view about what would succeed within the organization and what barriers would need to be over-come, and (2) the commitment (or lack thereof) of se-nior managers could make or break the community, so it was critical to understand their priorities.

First, 25 interviews were conducted with managers and directors across the company, all the way up to the se-nior team. The purpose of this “innovation audit” was to explore interviewees’ experiences with starting and build-ing new products and services within the company, in order to identify both impediments to innovation and opportunities to improve the approach to innovation companywide. The data was analyzed using a frame-work ( Hansen and Birkinshaw 2007 ) that broke down the innovation process from idea to implementation. The interviews revealed major organizational barriers to in-novation; for example, authority for taking an idea to implementation was fragmented across individuals and functions, and the sharing of ideas and customer knowl-edge was limited by organizational silos. The audit also highlighted mechanisms that could better support inno-vation efforts within the company. The resulting conclu-sions underscored the urgency of the CEO’s mission to engage employees and planted the seed for the innova-tion community.

In the wake of the interviews, the program team ran a co-creation workshop with the company’s CEO Council (top 40 executives) to identify and address discontinui-ties in vision and tactics for building an innovation com-munity. CEO Council members completed a survey prior to the workshop, providing their views on the basic ele-ments of the proposed community. This feedback was incorporated into a mock-up description of the future program. At their annual meeting, the members spent the afternoon in groups and worked through the mock-up in 90-minute breakout sessions, followed by a plenary dis-cussion. The intent was not to reach consensus, but in-stead to surface key assumptions and potential pitfalls and to provide a forum for these leaders to contribute to

The team aimed for a design driven by the organization’s needs and not the

technology’s features or functions.

September—October 2011 21

the design. With all units and functions represented, the session yielded important insight on what was needed to make innovation successful in the company.

The co-creation with managers surfaced a paradox: the management discipline traditionally emphasizes control, while open innovation requires managers to relinquish some level of control. As part of their design recommen-dations, the CEO Council established the Enabling In-novation Group (EIG) as a unique oversight group to resolve this tension. This executive working team provided oversight but also served to champion the pro-gram and encourage open participation from managers throughout the community. The work with managers re-vealed a paradox: the management discipline tradition-ally emphasizes control, while open innovation requires managers to relinquish some level of control. As part of their design recommendations, the CEO Council estab-lished the Enabling Innovation Group (EIG) as a unique oversight group to resolve this tension. This executive working team provided oversight but also served to champion the program and encourage open participation from managers throughout the community. More than 30 individuals were nominated for membership in the EIG; 10 directors and vice presidents were selected based on specifi c qualities, including their skills as coaches, infl u-encers, and leaders who could create energy around in-novation. This visible and desirable assignment helped to combat the perception of the community as another “pro-gram du jour,” and the personal capital of these individu-als lent the program credibility from the start. This team contributed to the program design, helped navigate inter-nal systems, and acted as spokespersons to leadership teams across the organization during the fi rst year. By year two, IdeaNet saw widespread adoption; this allowed the EIG’s oversight role to be phased out and the group to be replaced by Innovation Champions who worked to embed the community in the organizational culture.

Another critical learning from the workshop was the im-portance of demonstrating quick wins. Idea challenges were designed with this criteria in mind. In late 2008, a three-month pilot with 2,000 employees quickly demon-strated that idea challenges can serve as a call to action, sparking participation. Results of idea challenges func-tion as a fast and visible way to demonstrate quick wins.

Idea challenges also serve as a way to foster senior lead-ership engagement by giving managers ownership of the challenges. The CEO required each one of his direct reports to sponsor at least one idea challenge during the year, making participation by senior leaders mandatory. Importantly, this charge established a metric that mea-sured behavior—idea challenges required leaders to be transparent about their business challenges and to open discussion of possible solutions to a broader group of potential contributors. These leadership behaviors are a critical piece to help foster a culture of innovation.

A unique approach to oversight, prioritization of quick wins, and sponsorship of idea challenges all helped se-nior managers build a sense of ownership in the program. Senior managers actively shared in the process of de-signing a human system that would work with technol-ogy to create the community.

Engaging Employees

With the goal of incorporating into the community de-sign the motivations and needs of employees, we con-ducted nearly 50 interactive interviews with individuals representing over 20 job functions and multiple business units. Interviewees were asked about how innovation occurs in their organizations. These ethnographic in-terviews also included a participatory activity in which employees used small cards on a board to design a fi cti-tious community website. This tangible activity pro-vided employees with the ability to envision possible futures and provided the researchers with a richer data set than interviews alone would have.

Insight from the employee research was codifi ed in an “employee value proposition” that described the benefi ts that would motivate and sustain employee participation. Employees were looking for a community that would allow them to

• Connect with individuals across the organization, to fi nd employees with specifi c expertise and to build groups around shared topics of interest;

• Learn about innovative projects across the company;

• Have a voice, be part of change, and exercise an abil-ity to infl uence things; and

• Gain personal recognition for their contributions.

Using the employee value proposition as a guide, the IdeaNet platform made accessible a wide variety of tools to enhance access to information and provide opportuni-ties to contribute. This included such social networking tools as profi les and the capability for users to collabo-rate on ideas through commenting. The IdeaNet home page established a sense of community by including space for such content as success stories, innovation event announce-ments, challenge results, and recently posted ideas. This allowed employees to consume and contribute content in brief, productive interactions. A daily digest e-mail to interested subscribers compiled the previous day’s idea submissions to make activity on IdeaNet visible and ac-tionable even outside of the site, so that participants did not have to navigate to the site to follow recent changes.

Further interviews after the three-month pilot revealed that while employees are invested in their own ideas, they cared less about getting personal feedback than they did about knowing the overall challenge results. Partici-pants expected to see that the challenge had created


value for the unit. This learning led the program team to establish a challenge closing process to ensure that a deci-sion was made on every idea and communicated to the original submitter. For ideas adopted by the sponsoring unit, a time frame, owner, and next steps were summa-rized in a multipage “Results Memo,” which was pub-lished on IdeaNet and via the corporate intranet.

Post-pilot interviews also revealed that the majority of employees did not feel connected to the activity of in-novation, because they viewed innovation as a creative moment of identifying a large, disruptive idea. To build participation in the community, it was vital to broaden the defi nition of innovation and to enable each employee to see him or herself as a potential contributor. Site con-tent was added to describe the roles employees could play in innovation—as submitters, commenters, or connectors—and additional communication reinforced this message. Emphasis was placed on the broad scope of ideas that are valuable to the company, including everything from basic process improvements to new growth areas.

Once the community was active, the program team con-tinued to use participatory approaches with employees to guide activities to fulfi ll the community’s mission. For example, midway through the fi rst year the team hosted a day-long “Open Space” meeting focused on direction for the program’s second year. Open Space is an approach to conducting large meetings in which participants de-sign their own agenda by nominating and leading topics of their choice, within a predetermined overarching theme for the meeting ( Bunker and Alban 1997 ). Over 50 of IdeaNet’s stakeholders and most-active users attended, representing every business unit. The day included 23 participant-led discussions under the theme of “How can we continue to enable employees to innovate at Pitney Bowes?” Each discussion produced clear recommenda-tions for program improvements. In some cases the pro-gram team had to weigh employee preferences for new technical features against the ability of IdeaNet to sus-tain participation.

Ensuring that the program was in tune with employee motivations and making employees co-creators were im-portant factors in sustaining engagement in the community and differentiating IdeaNet from other top-down initia-tives. This involvement, like that of senior management, demonstrates that while the technology enabled parts of the design—such as publishing the results memos—the importance of the technology was far second to the par-ticipatory design of the human system surrounding it.

Including Middle Management

Middle managers played a unique role in the community, since in addition to being participants, they reviewed, prioritized, and implemented ideas. In some cases they

also initiated challenges or advocated to senior manage-ment for the launch of a particular challenge. During the early idea challenges, the program team worked along-side middle managers to actively guide business-unit chal-lenge teams in running effective challenges. Working with these middle managers also provided a front-row seat to the realities of running the process and allowed the program team to adjust the design based on work realities. This fl exibility proved hugely effective in ensuring a quality process that produced the kind of outcomes man-agers were driving for. It also enabled the program team to make quick interventions if anything went off track.

To accomplish this ongoing collaboration, a role was es-tablished for a “challenge architect” to work with spon-sors to translate their objectives into idea challenges and shepherd challenge teams to get the most out of em-ployee participants. This role is central to the iterative learning effort, as it serves as program eyes and ears on the business-unit challenge teams and supports their adoption of innovation practices. It also serves to main-tain process controls that have proven critical for elevat-ing the probability of success for this new initiative.

In the fi rst year, work with middle managers resulted in signifi cant modifi cations to the program. The most im-portant was building and refi ning the practice of framing idea challenges around current business issues (VanGundy 2005). At the outset of IdeaNet, sponsors tended to ask lightweight questions and to treat IdeaNet as an activity separate from work they were doing to address their strategic objectives. Working closely with middle man-agers made it possible to move from this compartmen-talized approach and position idea challenges as a tool that could be used to address current business challenges and explore key strategic questions. The result of this shift was an evolution in the type of challenges that were issued. In the fi rst year, the program team experimented to improve challenge outcomes and employee engage-ment; year two saw fewer challenges, but these were more closely linked with the business and more focused

Participants expected to see that

the challenge had created value for

the unit.


The make-up of the business-unit challenge teams has also evolved with experience. The process of running an effective challenge includes a team of four to fi ve people from the sponsoring organization who post comments on the site during the challenge and make decisions about the ideas once the challenge closes. Early on, these teams were made up of stakeholders who represented the perspectives of business functions relevant to the chal-lenge. Over time, however, it became clear that these challenge teams also needed to include the individuals who would have responsibility for acting on the ideas. Frequently, employees post ideas that are not completely actionable; the ideas are not fully formed, may identify only part of a solution, or are not well articulated. The inclusion on the challenge team of individuals charged with implementing ideas gives these individuals the opportu-nity to comment on ideas, ask questions, or build out ideas in collaboration with submitters.

In the third year, the challenge architect role itself has shifted, from working alongside individual middle man-agers to establishing a network of practitioners across the organization who shepherd challenge teams. The EIG, which provided strategic oversight and advocacy in year one, has now been replaced by these challenge practitio-ners, called “Innovation Champions,” who work to embed this innovation practice within the business units. Innova-tion champions have oversight of IdeaNet as a unit-level business tool; they facilitate challenges, track and report results, and build innovation practices within their units.

Results

The Pitney Bowes Employee Innovation Community was initiated to support organic growth and employee engagement as part of a renewed focus on the company’s culture of innovation. The program has demonstrated re-markable results on both fronts. The outcomes of idea challenges have increased the bottom line, contributed to strategy, impacted employee engagement, and created other intangible benefi ts.

From an engagement perspective, employee participation has steadily increased over time, with particular success with customer-facing employees such as call center staff, service personnel, and salespeople. The annual employee engagement survey includes six questions on innovation and empowerment; scores on fi ve of these questions in-creased 3–5 percent in the program’s fi rst year, a statisti-cally signifi cant movement. Employee engagement resulting from idea challenges is evidenced in very tangi-ble ways. For example, IdeaNet provided an opportunity for R&D personnel and technical fellows to engage in conversations across the organization and make connec-tions outside their own work groups. One idea posted by a developer in India related to an active project in the corpo-rate R&D group. The R&D team was able to include this

on growth—refl ecting the increasing comfort with using challenges as a modality for approaching strategic innova-tion questions ( Figure 2 ).

One excellent example of how challenges have come to support innovation work is their use by one business unit’s R&D organization. This team actively experi-mented with IdeaNet challenges and evolved them to function as the front end of their innovation pipeline. Each challenge issued by the group addresses a strategic area of opportunity, and all employees across the unit are invited to participate. Top ideas from these challenges are reviewed by an executive committee within the unit, which makes decisions about further development. High involvement—over 75 percent of all employees in the unit participate—has contributed to the identifi cation of additional business opportunities for development. In ad-dition, the active engagement from this unit has informed many of the companywide best practices for the program.

Figure 2 .— Number and type of challenges, 2009 and 2010


developer in project discussions and move quickly to pilot the idea by working with his network in India.

From the perspective of building a culture of innovation, behavior change has also been visible, most notably among middle managers. For middle management, sup-port for innovation and the innovation community took shape as leaders stepping forward to use idea challenges as a business tool. Their willingness to demonstrate a de-sire for open collaboration—to make their business chal-lenges public and consider varying solutions—was a signifi cant new behavior. Another important cultural im-pact was an increase in cross-organizational collaboration, evidenced by cosponsored challenges in which business units shared responsibility for implementing ideas.

Of the 52 challenges launched in 2009 and 2010, 38 pro-duced value, either tangible (in the form of bottom-line impact as cost savings or revenue gains) or intangible (in the form, for instance, of strategic value). Some value was realized within the fi rst two years; the time horizon for realizing the value of longer-term or more complex

opportunities is projected at two or more years in the future ( Figure 3 ). Of the 38 value-producing challenges, thus far, near-term actions emerging from 7 constitute the majority of the $10 million in revenue and $320,000 in cost savings realized to date. Yet to be measured are results from six other challenges, which include new products in development, as well as process or service improvements still in progress. The remaining 25 chal-lenges have produced a variety of intangible values, includ-ing increased customer satisfaction, increased employee engagement, greater effi ciency, and new training and recognition programs. Ideas from some challenges were also incorporated into product roadmaps and other long-term strategic initiatives and business strategy.

Challenges produced value in diverse ways. For exam-ple, a sales challenge resulted in three major actions that contributed to a 23 percent year-over-year increase in revenue. As the result of another challenge, a simple new protocol was instituted for call center agents that in-creased customer satisfaction scores by 10 percent and was still maintained at this level a year later. In another

Figure 3 .— Value of IdeaNet challenges, 2009–2010


instance, two challenges sponsored by international orga-nizations that were active at the same time enabled a ser-endipitous connection that yielded new service contracts.

Not all challenges produce value, in particular because challenges require a balance between asking questions with enough uncertainty to warrant a challenge and framing narrowly enough to produce actionable ideas. A signifi cant number of the early challenges served to im-prove innovation practices, like that of framing the chal-lenge question. The overall percentage of challenges with limited results was 27 percent (14 challenges), al-though the percentage decreased from 38 percent in 2009 to just 10 percent in 2010. Even these apparent failures, however, must be seen as learning opportuni-ties. “Failed” challenges offer a window for sponsors and senior management to refl ect on what can be learned—either about the business space or the deci-sions to be made, even if there are no specifi c actions resulting from the challenge itself.

These outcomes illustrate the complexity of measur-ing results from innovation and represent the diversity of results managers can expect. At Pitney Bowes, a signifi cant driver of the effort was the CEO’s inten-tion to focus equally on growth and fostering a culture of innovation culture change. The actual return on investment of IdeaNet includes both tangible and in-tangible value generated across a time horizon ex-tending years out. Many actions, like those that increase customer satisfaction, are of signifi cant im-port to the company but are diffi cult to assign a dollar value to. In addition, current actions underway repre-sent a portfolio of ideas with estimated future value that has yet to be calculated. Finally, the community itself is now an important component of the compa-ny’s innovation architecture, achieving the CEO’s ob-jective of engaging employees and fostering a culture of innovation.

Lessons Learned

A number of factors contributed to the success of the Pitney Bowes Employee Innovation Program (see “Key Success Factors,” p. 27.). However, one lesson was cen-tral: implementing technology for collaborative inno-vation is principally about designing for a human system; technology is secondary. In the case of the Pitney Bowes Employee Innovation Program, the pro-gram team used participation from stakeholders at all levels of the organization to build a community that ac-complished the CEO’s intention for engagement and growth, while also serving the unique needs of each constituent group. Based on this example, managers can draw on a few key design principles when creating an innovation community—or any system that requires the commitment of groups across organizational silos or management hierarchy.

1. Start from your context. Best practices are helpful, but it is critical to consider the context of the organi-zational culture. Another organization’s practice or technology platform can’t be forced to fi t your par-ticular culture. The key to sustainability is the upfront work to understand the needs and barriers that are unique to the organization.

2. Design fi rst, consider technology second. Estab-lishing an innovation community is not about procur-ing a technology platform, but about designing a socio-technical system that takes into account real organizational dynamics.

3. Plan for change. Build in the practice to monitor, learn, and modify as the community evolves, ideally in collaboration with stakeholder groups.

4. Recognize and accept failures as learning oppor-tunities. Even with the best design practices and par-ticipation, failure must be accepted as a natural part of an evolutionary human system. Set aside time to refl ect on what has been learned—but don’t over-think it. Keep experimenting.

This effort was well served by good planning; how-ever, the planning, like the program itself, was dynamic

One lesson was central:

implementing technology for collaborative innovation is

principally about designing for a human system; technology is secondary.


evolution. Also thanks to the engaged employees of Pitney Bowes for continued participation and support of innovation.

References

Bansler , J. 1989 . Systems development research in Scandinavia: Three theoretical schools . Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems 1 : 3 – 20 .

Brown , T. 2009 . Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation . New York : HarperCollins .

Bunker , B. B. , and Alban , B. T. 1997 . Large Group Interventions: Engaging the Whole System for Rapid Change . San Francisco : Jossey-Bass .

Hansen , M. , and Birkinshaw , J. 2007 . The innovation value chain . Harvard Business Review 85 ( 6 ): 121 – 130 .

Kensing , F. , and Blomberg , J. 1998 . Participatory design: Issues and concerns . Computer Supported Cooperative Work 7 : 167 – 168 .

O’Brien , R. 1998 . Um exame da abordagem metodológica da pesquisa ação [An Overview of the Methodological Approach of Action Research] . In Teoria e Prática da Pesquisa Ação [Theory and Practice of Action Research] , ed. Roberto Richardson . João Pessoa , Brazil : Universidade Federal da Paraíba . (English version). http://www.web.ca/∼robrien/papers/arfi nal.html (accessed June 21, 2011) .

Schön , D. 1983 . The Refl ective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action . New York : Basic Books .

VanGundy , A. B. 2005 . The care and framing of strategic innovation challenges . The Wonderful World of Jeffrey Baumgartner , Innovation, September 29. http://www.jpb.com/creative/VanGundyFrameInnov.pdf (accessed June 21, 2011) .

Weisbord , M. R. 2004 . Productive Workplaces Revisited: Dignity, Meaning, and Community in the 21 st Century . San Franciso : Jossey-Bass .

and based on refl ection-in-action ( Schön 1983 ). The imperative for quick wins cannot supersede good plan-ning. In this case, the program team used visible action to meet the need for quick wins at the same time that those actions created the space needed for deliberate planning.

Conclusion

Innovation is inherently uncertain, and human systems are dynamic. Building a sustainable innovation community required the program team to gain authentic participation from stakeholders and be open to evolving the program design to meet the unique needs of all groups. The team did not approach the project as master architects, but rather followed the spirit of the participatory design notion of the “designer-as-facilitator.” The result is a design that uses technology as an enabler and is bounded but not con-trolled. Striking this balance is not without its challenges, and the program team regularly considered where and how to intervene. The resulting community meets different needs at each level in the organization, but collectively it clearly serves the interests of Pitney Bowes to drive growth and support a culture of innovation.

The authors would like to thank the teams, individuals and managers who supported the early research and contrib-uted to the program throughout pilot, launch, and ongoing

Key Success Factors for an Enterprise Innovation Community

Stakeholder involvement at all levels

Participation should include senior managers as sponsors, mid-level managers as project leads and idea implementers, and all employees as contributors. The program should have a senior executive as sponsor.

Pilot program before enterprise launch

A pilot program provides the opportunity to test the approach by starting small and scaling. A good pilot program can help identify ways to overcome existing barriers to innovation and evolve the design prior to a formal launch.

Value proposition for community members

Understanding what will motivate participation in a specifi c organization is critical. Typical benefi ts include personal rec-ognition, networking across the organization, and contributing ideas that positively impact the company.

Network of support

To ensure long-term sustainability, the program should be owned by the entire organization (not a single unit) and include a network of champions to embed innovation practices in each unit of the organization.

Transparency of results

The practice of sharing results should mirror the open nature of the community and should include both quick wins and long-term work in development. Participants don’t expect that every idea will be implemented, but they do want to see the outcomes.

Foundation in current business objectives

Challenges should be focused on current business objectives, enabling them to become part of existing work supported by a ready-made team to execute ideas.


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Documents

Building an Innovation Community