SparkX – Enterprise Crowdfunding Spark innovation from bottom-up Abstract Decision-making on approval and budgeting processes for new projects tends to be top-down in most companies. In contrast, crowdfunding uses the "wisdom of the crowd" to make funding decisions and is successfully used in the public scope (e.g. Kickstarter). SparkX is an enterprise crowdfunding platform that adapts this successful crowdfunding model to leverage its benefits in the enterprise context . This platform complements the traditional top-down decision-making to allow employees to collaborate on funding breakthrough ideas. SparkX helps to engage employees, promotes open innovation, revitalizes the culture intrapreneurship and sparks collaborative innovation from the bottom up. SPARKX – EN TER PRISE CROWD FUNDIN G Employee engagement is a challenging issue for most companies these days. In a study of 142 countries, Gallup found that only 13% of employees worldwide are engaged in their work. All employees have ideas, credible or otherwise, but very few, however, get an allowance and an opportunity to act on these. Companies want to empower their employees to innovate, but many innovative ideas fail to be realized, because they could not acquire needed resources. Decisionmaking on approval and budgeting processes in most companies tends to be top-down. Therefore, submitting a project proposal to a review board could take months to get a thumbs up or down and, if the project got approved, months more to fund and staff it. Idea management should not just be one centralized instance which decides on viable ideas, instead it should encompass the whole company. Crowdfunding uses the "wisdom of the crowd" to make funding decisions: If employees (the "crowd") invest enough of their allocated funds to reach a project's funding target, then needed resources are committed and the project begins. Moreover, crowdfunding is not just about acquiring resources, it is also about a company-wide exposure, feedback and validation of the project, and empowerment and engagement of employees. Employees get involved by submitting an idea, by critiquing it, volunteering and suggesting improvements, or by funding it. Submitters set a funding target to cover the needed resources for getting the project off the ground and realized. Crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter or Indigogo have proven to be very successful in the public space, SparkX adapts this successful model to leverage its benefits in the enterprise context. The management decides on a budget pool per quarter (e.g. $100.000) that is used to allocate internal resources to internal projects based on the crowdfunding approach. Thereby, every employee gets a certain amount of a digital currency, called Sparks, per quarter to fund submitted projects. At the end of every quarter, all pledged Sparks are matched with the available budget and allocated to the projects. Only projects that attract a relatively large number of interested people inside the company and, therefore, reach the funding target would receive the needed resources. To reward employees for funding successful projects, those individuals receive additional Sparks, based on the success of the projects, to have more influence on future projects. Compared to existing idea management solutions, this platform shall be used for already conceptualized, well-defined and, if possible, prototyped ideas that require resources for the next step. This enterprise crowdfunding approach promotes open innovation and puts employees in the middle of the ideation process. SparkX complements the traditional top-down decision-making with a new platform that allows employees to collaborate on funding breakthrough ideas. Thereby, it democratizes the decision-making for a defined budget pool. This platform encourages employees to think out-of-the-box and gives everyone inside the company with a great idea the chance to have it seen and realized. Ultimately, SparkX helps to engage employees, revitalizes the culture of intrapreneurship and sparks collaborative innovation from the bottom up. Lukas Masuch, Henning Muszynski, Patrick Herholz 2 SPARKX – EN TER PRISE CROWD FUNDIN G 3 SPARKX – EN TER PRISE CROWD FUNDIN G 4
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