“We started hoping to mine our 8,000+ current client projects for innovation,” said Ravi Kumar S., EVP & Chief Delivery Officer for Infosys, a leading tech consulting and IT services firm.
“After looking at 4 or 5, we got excited because we’d found numerous ways to improve client outcomes,” he continued. “Also, we realized it would take a decade to review the rest of them.”
Instead, the company decided to unleash a grassroots effort to encourage, tee-up, and vet the best innovative ideas emerging at the points where its people interacted with their clients. The program, launched last April, was appropriately titled Zero Distance.
“Most ideation frameworks are anti-innovation,” Kumar explained. “So our initial phase was to provoke ideation and participation with a call to action, informed with just enough design principles to guide the process without dictating it.”
To prompt that internal peer momentum, it identified 300 or so influencers across the company who’d serve as initial evangelists for the first 5 weeks after the program was launched last April. The team, dubbed them “The Jedi,” helped encourage incremental, adjacent and cross-functional ideas that could be subsequently celebrated.
“Once we had that momentum, we added a social tech platform for posting and sharing the templates, which pushed the conversation further along,” Kumar said.

from Forbes – Tech http://ift.tt/1XVdF8g
via IFTTT