A Global Consumer-Electronic company was facing challenges with the increased competition in the market. The price fluctuations from technological and competitive changes created wild swings in supply and demand. Finally, products quickly become obsolete and thereby abruptly develop short product lifecycles.
They needed an effective way of regulating production by predicting the competition and demand.

Idea Submission & Selection: The solution scenario was not a direct open call for the next big idea. InnovateUs took an approach that combined personnel interviews, business process mapping and operational data analysis to break that down into components of the challenge.

By reducing the challenge into a set of smaller, bounded problems the client was able to assemble a cross-functional team spanning the end-to-end business process that dotted the challenge.

Each challenge-component was framed as its own problem and posted on the InnovateUs Idea Market™ soliciting for ideas from the cross-functional team. This allowed not just the core users associated with that process but also other users who served as its end users and intermediate users to collaborate on the proposed solutions. Seed ideas were voted upon and rated. Anytime an idea was ranked between medium to high, the users were specifically requested to log what could be changed about the idea to improve its ranking. Users bid on ideas they predicted to be the most effective solutions.

Idea Analysis & Recommendation: The InnovateUs Idea Market™ produced an immense cross-functional body of knowledge that was hitherto absent. Having made such knowledge transparent and shared, increased both the quality of prediction as well as the evolution of ideas.

InnovateUs tools facilitated forecasting of products heading for obsolescence with a good enough lead time to regulate production. Ideas were translated into actionable strategies that led to a moderation in the swing between supply and demand.