Nielsen | Brightidea

Creating A Realistic Innovation Roadmap

“Brightidea gives us the flexibility we need. At any point in time we are supporting 15 or more business units, each with their own unique needs and requirements.”

Anne Marie Dumais

ANN MARIE DUMAIS
Director, Planning and Governance, The Nielsen Company

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Challenges Per Year
10-15

Highly Qualified Idea Submissions Per Quarter
500

Documented Hours Saved
4,000,000

The Challenge

Nielsen provides market intelligence worldwide in marketing and consumer information, television and other media measurement, online intelligence, mobile measurement, trade shows and related properties with a presence in 100 countries with 36,000 employees.

Nielsen knew that innovation is the key to success, in both what a company creates and how its ideas are marketed; however, they were experiencing difficulty defining “innovation” within their own program created internally. They needed a better way to effectively triage ideas, prioritize and roadmap innovations.

Ann Marie Dumais, Planning & Governance Director at Nielsen, explained, “We weren’t there as a company, we were trying to do it on our own [using only Sharepoint], and we learned the hard way.”

As Nielsen’s internal innovation program grew more complex, they needed a better way to increase employee motivation and willingness to participate in topic specific initiatives. For those already participating, they needed an easier way to manage and measure participation across programs in terms of which types of programs drove more ideas. They needed accessible and visible statistics whenever senior management requested to see results.

“We actually asked Brightidea not to train anyone to see if people with different background and skills could manipulate and navigate through the system, and we made sure that they could.”

The Solution

Nielsen approached Brightidea to implement a flexible, customizable and autonomous platform that was at the same time intuitive to use.

Now, the company runs a series of 10-15 innovation initiatives at any given time all year in specific identified categories across all business units. These initiatives are centered on a topic and objective, and can be run in short term sprints or run all year long.

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The Results

The Brightidea platform has enabled better management and prioritization of ideas for Nielsen, who now are able to produce over 500 highly-qualified idea submissions per quarter that are detailed and results-focused.

As a measure of the program’s success, one of the key innovation initiatives that Nielsen runs is called “Cycle Time” and is centered on saving time. The initiative is run quarterly and annually, and then measured against business revenue, quality or cost on the backend. In 2013, Nielsen was able to save 4,000,000 hours documented across all teams. Many initiatives are also run related to new product development and have generated ideas now in incubation or proof of concept mode.

About Nielsen

A global leader in audience insights, data and analytics, Nielsen shapes the future of media with accurate measurement of what people listen to and watch.

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About Brightidea

At Brightidea, we’re passionate about innovation. We believe it’s the lifeblood of progress, advancing the human condition and improving the world around us. To that end, we’ve set out to accelerate the success of innovation by empowering those behind it with advanced software to facilitate and streamline the ideation process—and the collaboration it thrives on.

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