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[[Future of Innovation Main Page]]<br><br>
In today's economic environment, many companies are counting on being able to innovate their way out of the recession and they will look to increase their use of practical social collaboration tools to advance this process. Leveraging social community tools to securely access the ideas of a broader set of people-including employees, customers and partners-helps high-tech enterprises generate the innovation that leads to new products, processes and services necessary to reduce costs and fuel revenue growth. When Electronic Arts saw that many of its employees were on Facebook, it used SharePoint to create a social networking portal on its intranet that allowed employees to share knowledge and innovative ideas. In just eight months, the portal attracted more than one-third of the company's employees and has helped them reduce duplicated efforts and increase knowledge sharing, all in a secure environment.<BR><BR>
A number of high-tech companies have expanded the range of their communities, opening them up to include partners and customers. The key to success for this broader ideation effort is to ensure such collaboration is done in a secure environment rather than an unsecure, public platform. By empowering employees, customers and partners to interact and share ideas and information in a secure, real-time infrastructure, companies can reduce costs, shrink time-to-market and deliver products that best meet customer demands.<BR><BR>
At this point there are several toold out there which enable companies to harness crowd resources when it comes to innovation:
InnoCentive Global, online marketplace where organizations in need of innovation can utilize a global network of over 160,000 of the world�s brightest problem solvers.<BR>
CrowdSpirit � A platform that enables businesses to involve innovators from outside the company directly in the design of innovative products and services.<BR>
IdeaScale � Powers feedback communities. Users submit ideas while the community comments and votes on the ideas.<BR>
Peer-to-Patent � Harnesses citizen-experts to improve patent quality in software, internet, business methods, and e-commerce categories.<BR>