Silicon Valley is the heart of entrepreneurship. New technologies are created each day to help companies improve revenue, decrease costs, innovate and to disrupt their space. Pick a table in a coffee shop in Silicon Valley—any table—and the odds are you will hear two people discussing how their new venture will disrupt their industry.
Digitalization is the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities. Companies that don’t digitalize often have corporate silos and barriers that block innovation. But those that do see those barriers collapse to dramatically increase the flow of ideas. People with great ideas can now leap over those walls to share insights, create corporate challenges, hackathons, and shark tanks to help their companies disrupt an industry.
Companies that digitalize often create innovation labs to foster entrepreneurship and innovation across the business. These labs address large challenges with the expectation of breakthrough solutions. They do this by bringing together expertise from different areas of the business to transform it.
As a product of Silicon Valley, innovation and disruption are at the core of who I am. I am Silicon Valley. I chose to join Brightidea because it’s the most comprehensive platform in the industry to help companies innovate and disrupt. We’ve worked with over 300 global brands including:
- Cisco. As a worldwide leader in IT, Cisco helps companies to seize the opportunities of tomorrow by proving that amazing things can happen when you connect the previously disconnected. The global SIEC (Services Innovation Excellence Center) team, comprised of 13,000 employees in 96 countries, is entirely focused on aligning strategies in innovation and business to deliver impactful business outcomes for Cisco customers, partners, and employees. See the recent article in Harvard Business Review to understand Cisco’s search for the next big idea.
- GE. Ranked as one of the world’s largest businesses with revenues of more than $160 billion, GE is a giant global conglomerate constantly searching for new areas of opportunity. With this in mind, GE’s CEO Jeffery Immelt launched Ecomagination, a corporate initiative to develop new power grid technologies, a market valued at $200 billion over the next decade. By the end of a 10-week challenge, the site garnered 70,000 users from over 150 countries, contributing 3,844 ideas and 80,000 comments, and casting over 120,000 votes. At a press event soon afterwards, GE announced the winners of the Ecomagination challenge; twelve projects were selected to partner with GE and receive funds totaling $55 million. In addition, the contest’s most voted-on submission received a $50,000 award. See the recent article in Harvard Business Review to understand the transformation of General Electric.
These companies have used the Brightidea platform to bring order to the complexity of innovation. The platform does more than run simple challenges or improve areas of business. The product has nine different apps—with six more coming—each with unique capabilities to help innovation labs create disruption:
- Discuss: to initiate engagement
- Solve: to overcome a problem
- Optimize: to improve a business area
- Hackathon: to create a prototype
- Incubate: to develop new opportunities
- Pitch: to fund an investment
- Monitor: to view market trends
- Understand: to investigate a topic
- Suggest: to consider any idea
At Brightidea, we are passionate about innovation. My name is Cameron Ackbury, Head of Sales at Brightidea.
Let’s innovate!
