About:
Airbus, founded in 1970, is one of France’s leading aeronautics and space companies. Airbus contributes about half of all commercial airline orders worldwide.
Idea behind Crowdcraft, the Airbus Innovation Program:
Mina Bastawros wanted to bring new game-changing ideas into Airbus. His aim was “To design the aircraft of the future with the people for the people.”
He realized that while developing new corporate innovation within an organization the size of Airbus, maintaining the opportunity only for internal people is not a viable option. He suggested expanding the generation and deployment of ideas to innovators outside the organization.
This resulted in Crowdcraft, a crowdsourcing and crowd-staffing platform designed to find solutions to technical challenges. The platform connected problems to problem solvers, seeking to reduce work time and cost through more efficient ways for buyers to access goods and services. The promising ideas received direct support from the top executives of Airbus.
Results:
Crowdcraft was a massive success for the company as it achieved 61% cost savings and 59% time savings compared to traditional new product development methods. This worked well for Mina too. As he was appointed as a Strategic Marketing Director at Airbus Corporate Jets and later promoted to the Vice President of Creative & Digital Marketing.
We have seen numerous examples of intrapreneurship programs that resulted in ideas that changed the fortunes of organizations. Be it BASF’s successful intrapreneurship program Chemovator, ITC’s e-choupal initiative, Nitin Prajanpe’s experiments at Hindustan Unilever, or Deutsche Telekom’s UQBATE program.
Embracing Intrapreneurship is the new winning formula for organizations to thrive and get a step ahead of the competition for this decade. Organizations ought to recognize intrapreneurs within them and give them a stage to share and deploy their ideas. For in the given future, it is employee-driven innovation that will help improve the innovation potential of organizations, and not just management-driven initiatives.
Want help getting employee ideas? Getting hands on an idea management platform is the right place to start. Need help finding the right software for your organization’s needs? This listicle should help – List of best idea management software
