An employee-oriented path of innovation management. Juice producer Eckes-Granini has now established its own “Innovation Space” to encourage its employees to contribute new ideas to the business process. The beverage company would like to use this platform to motivate its employees to participate actively in the company’s development and to contribute their own projects. This is made possible by the Azure Cloud.
The “Innovation Space” brings along some functionalities. AI elements such as Microsoft Text Analytics and Azure Cognitive Search are integrated to make the exchange as versatile as possible. As CIO reports, gamification is also to become a central element of the platform in order to motivate employees to contribute their own ideas even better.
Eckes-Granini, the Rhine-Hessian juice producer, has employees at twelve locations and would like to bring them together in the form of the collaborative platform to collect new ides in a structured manner. Since the company has already been working with MS Office 365 for some time, these services will also be fully integrated into the “Innovation Space” to increase security in handling the new portal.
The developers of the platform, the company Itacs, promise an intuitive process control to make the exchange of information as easy as possible.
“We wanted to create a platform for the exchange of information and for inspiration across all our national companies for all employees, which is very different from the usual team sites, conveys the innovative character and also has a playful, interactive part.”
So far, Granini says, the employees have accepted the new platform very well and are starting to experiment with the functions. The juice producer’s example shows how open innovation and co-creation can work and how important it is to involve employees in the innovation process at an early stage.
Post picture: Eckes-Granini
