The “Idea Hopper” – Engaging staff and transforming business

Today’s organisations need staff to be fully engaged in order to drive business transformation. They are looking at ways to:-

  • Build an innovation culture
  • Enable employees to share, collaborate and support ideas
  • Ensure the value of innovating and improving is visible and tracked
  • Enable employees to get feedback on feasibility status
  • Improve organisational agility
  • Show proper governance on capturing business knowledge

Idea Hopper

The Idea Hopper is a cloud or on-premise application based on standard MS tools. It is incredibly easy to use and get started, giving:-      

  • Employees the ability to pitch improvement ideas for all to see
  • An ability to track and proactively manage idea progression through various stages to completion             
  • Automated systems-generated communications on status                                   
  • An opportunity for staff to collaborate on business challenges
  • A way to capture and retain valuable knowledge in the business
  • Automated workflows to proactively progress ideas, avoiding potential risk of hold ups through the assessment and delivery process; and,                          
  • A summary dashboard to visually display the number of ideas submitted and the business value achieved.

Use Case Example – Contact Energy

Contact Energy Limited is one of New Zealand’s largest energy companies, with both a Generation & Development (G&D) and Customer (retail) arm. G&D has over 300 staff and operate 11 power stations around New Zealand.

G&D was keen to use a digital platform where staff could suggest business improvement ideas or raise challenges and enlist help to solve them.

Adoption and Benefits

The Idea Hopper has been extremely well received by Contact Energy. Operationally, the G&D team has embraced the use of the Idea Hopper (fondly known by staff as ‘The Hopper’) and have adopted its use into their standard operational processes.

Since Contact Energy began recording and tracking the progress on improvement ideas with Idea Hopper, the G&D team has received hundreds of ideas from their staff, and progressed over 160+ into deliverable projects, resulting in calculated business value in the millions of dollars that has been reported in their annual reports.

We can help transform your business

The Idea Hopper has helped us to build a healthy innovation culture where raising new ideas is fun and satisfying. The Hopper helps us to share stories for improvement, track progress, and makes the value of improving and innovating more visible.

Sarah Williams
Innovation & Improvement Lead Generation & Development