Innovation from within: empowering your workforce through crowdsourcing

Organizations can harness their workforce’s collective genius to drive innovation and create a meaningful employee experience.

In brief

• The EY Americas Innovation team partnered with Cornell University to research how organizations can leverage innovation crowdsourcing for their unique challenges
• The research team identified best practices for effective crowdsourcing campaigns, which can be reviewed in detail via this whitepaper

This article is co-authored by:

• Dr. Michael Paz – Professor of Accounting and Behavioral Research at Cornell University

Additional contributors:

• Nicole Green – Americas Innovation Culture & Ecosystems Lead, Ernst & Young LLP
• Jennifer Kim – Manager, People Advisory Services, Ernst & Young LLP
• Joe Gelman – Manager, People Advisory Services, Ernst & Young LLP
• Grace Schwartz – Senior Consultant, People Advisory Services, Ernst & Young LLP
• Carly Sappern – Senior Consultant, People Advisory Services, Ernst & Young LLP

Many organizations struggle to optimize their workforce and foster employee engagement. Crowdsourcing for innovation is a powerful tool that can address these challenges by enabling a more efficient allocation of resources and empowering employees with a sense of ownership. By leveraging the collective intelligence, skillsets, and creativity of the workforce, crowdsourcing drives innovation, fosters social connections, and uncovers breakthrough solutions that unlock new value. As organizations increasingly seek to remain competitive and adapt to rapidly changing business environments, it's critical to understand how crowdsourcing can be successfully implemented to address specific challenges.

In partnership with Cornell University, the Ernst & Young (EY) Americas Innovation team conducted extensive research to better understand how organizations can successfully implement crowdsourcing strategies tailored to their unique needs. This research reveals that crowdsourcing leads to a more efficient allocation of resources and empowers employees with a sense of ownership. In fact, larger organizations can benefit significantly from crowdsourcing as it provides a direct pipeline to source innovative ideas from all levels, thereby accelerating ideation and idea evaluation processes. Additionally, a study by the Harvard Business Review found that organizations that use crowdsourcing to innovate are more likely to outperform their peers in terms of revenue growth and market share. Through this partnership with Cornell University, the EY team has identified best practices for successfully implementing crowdsourcing strategies that can be tailored to specific organizational needs. By leveraging the collective intelligence of employees and stakeholders, organizations can realize significant value and stay competitive in today's rapidly changing business environment.

Create a meaningful employee experience 

Implementing a crowdsourcing capability has the power to redefine the employee experience and foster a culture of agency and innovation within an organization. This approach enables employees to contribute their unique perspectives and ideas, promoting a sense of ownership and collaboration that drives creativity and engagement.

Best practices in crowdsourcing 

Through extensive research and experimentation, the EY team has identified reliable strategies to help organizations maximize the benefits realized from their crowdsourcing initiatives:

1. Create an easily accessible and intuitive crowdsourcing user experience, presented with a clear purpose to minimize barriers to entry and encourage employees to participate
2. Engineer crowdsourcing prompts strategically to stimulate curiosity, avoiding prescriptive language that may limit the diversity or creativity of responses
3. Frame crowdsourcing challenges around the target audience’s interests and offer incentives to participants that align with the desired outcome and perceived level of effort required
4. Facilitate collaboration within the crowdsourcing challenge to encourage knowledge sharing, critical thinking, and upskilling which allows participants to naturally assume different persona types that uniquely contribute to the success of the initiative. Enabling teaming across diverse roles such as ideators, enhancers, leaders and more will result in more creative and comprehensive solutions. 

Exploring incentives and motivation in crowdsourcing 

Companies can strategically leverage extrinsic and intrinsic incentives to optimize engagement and productivity in innovation crowdsourcing campaigns. There may be overlaps, for example, intrinsic motivations to pursue career enhancing opportunities can be tied to downstream financial benefits that result from career success. Ultimately, different incentive structures will be most effective depending on the culture, target audience, and intended outcome.