There are 2 types of approaches re idea collection: Bottom Up and Top Down.
- Bottom up - encourage the community/employees to submit ANY Idea that they might have
It fosters a year-round culture of innovation by encouraging spontaneous idea sharing and continuous engagement.
This approach helps builds the concept of "One Place for Innovation", remove psychological obstacle, and ensure no good ideas will be lost or overlooked.
To support that each system has an embedded permanent "Idea Box" - Top down - This approach invites employees and community members to contribute ideas on specific topics or business challenges pre-defined by the innovation team and management.
This approach is a strategic tool to achieve the company goals, by launching specific well-defined, targeted challenges aiming focused solutions. It creates a focused burst of creativity by instilling urgency and driving short-term engagement with targeted audience.
These challenges usually have dedicated managers "owning" their segment of activity which allows a more distributed resource allocation and scalability
To support that the system includes a robust report wizard, empower the campaign managers with vast permissions on their campaigns. and training materials on the comprehensive configuration and management tools.
Both approaches are fully supported by our platform and can be promoted independently or in combination, depending on your strategy.
Our best practice is to combine both of them.
The below table summarizes the main differences between the 2 approaches:
* The below are based on Qmarkets Best Practices. Consult with your CSM where needed.
| Approach | Bottom Up | Top Down |
| Enabler | Ad-hoc/permanent idea Box | Time-based campaigns/challenges |
| Aim, experimentation & Risk | Great for incremental improvements and safe ideas. | Encourage bold thinking and disruptive innovation due to their time-limited nature. |
| Cognitive Engagement | Rely on passive engagement—employees contribute when inspired | Actively stimulate thinking through prompts, themes, or incentives, often leading to deeper ideation |
| Audience | Wide Everyone that have access to the system | Targeted e.g. users from specific business unit, countries etc. Or it can also be to entire company but with dedicated topic |
| Timeline | Always Open | Time-based |
| Main Government & Resource Allocation | SMEs assigned per idea type/domain. Requires ongoing moderation and review, which can be resource-intensive over time. | Dedicated campaign/challenge managers. Concentrate resources during specific periods, allowing for more efficient use of evaluators and decision-makers. |
| How idea are selected/promoted | Each idea is examined whether good enough to be promoted or not | Each campaign is a competition Ideas are compared between each other |
| Relevant Evaluation methods | Score Card | Score Card, Token Voting, Idea Tournament |
| Auto Transition Rules | Time-based and usually connected to a pre defined ongoing process e.g semi annual review that all ideas accumulated are examined. e.g after 2 weeks and more than X comments, idea is promoted to next state | Campaign progress - based e.g. when campaign closes, all ideas should be promoted/archived |
| Special features | Campaign Summary Scheduler Campaign Bulk Email | |
| Data & Metrics | Generates continuous data that can be used for Metrics for overall adoption, activity efficiency and scalability. Provides clear picture for trends over time and cross--company segments. | Offer clean start/end points, making it easier to measure participation, idea quality, impact and ROI per challenge. In addition, helps analyze the innovation activity, outcome and impact vs the company goals. |
| Access | A dedicated strip in the homepage | Homepage Strip, Campaigns Menu |
| Communication plan | - Periodically - Announce top contributors/winners in last X months, etc., | - Based on the campaign timeline (including teasers before, reminders during, and summaries after) - Announce winners - Emphasis achievements/ROI |