Crowdsourcing has become a hot trend and Imaginatik was one of the early players in this space. They recognized from the start that it takes more than technology to properly harvest, evaluate, and implement the ideas generated by large groups of people. I recently spoke with Mark Turrell, CEO and co-founder of Imaginatik, a software and services company specializing in tapping into the brainpower of thousands of people to solve problems. It is traded on the London Stock Exchange.

Mark’s original Ph.D. research at Cass Business School investigated the use of collaborative technologies, and he initiated the study of software server log data to track actual usage, rather than relying on interviews and survey data.  Mark said that fifteen years ago companies were primarily deriving insight out of data. Now they also look to groups of people and this is the focus of Imaginatik.

Imaginatik provides a flexible platform and many of the implementations have been co-developed with their clients including Chevron, Pfizer, Whirlpool, and Xerox.  They now have an out of-the-box product called Chembioconnect that was co-developed with chemists. It makes use of visualizations from CambridgeSoft that are specially designed to handle chemical data.

Mark provided an example of how crowdsourcing can help. CSC was faced with a challenge in its financial organization as they had a cash flow management issue. Instead of getting together a few insiders and perhaps hiring a consultant, CSC turned to see what they could get from a broader perspective. They invited 1000 people to offer their suggestions and within a week they had over a 100 solutions to sift through.  They discovered that the invoice date significantly effected payment backlog. A simple change in their invoicing process has resulted in an improved cash management at the rate of over $1 million (US) a day.

In another case, Cargill, a large private food processing company is using Imaginatik in over 40 divisions. They have achieved improvements in many areas. For example, they have been able to significantly reduce rodent infestation through several solutions. They have also been able to share the solutions that did not work so others do not waste time trying them over again.

Imaginatik is a web-based platform. The majority of clients used the cloud but not all.  The core system is their Idea Central. It supports the harvesting of ideas, manages comments and offers evaluation and tracking.  There is also rewards and recognition. I asked Mark about this latter component. He said that the key is fitting rewards and recognition to the culture of the organization. For example in one family owned food company, contributors received points. These points turned into money for the charity of their choice.  Some other companies offer gift vouchers for the employees’ use and a letter from the President.  Here is a sample contribution harvesting screen.

Mark said the real challenges are not technical. In addition to proper reward and recognition, you need user and leadership engagement. In the past few years the volume and quality of contributions has increased. Mark and I both feel that the increased transparency and participation in the Web contributes to this increase.  Here is a sample rating screen.

Imaginatik is working on improvements in the process side to better handle the increased volume.  They have implemented a semantic analysis component that can build word clouds on the fly to help sort through contributions. They already have manual tagging. They are also doing more work with metadata to link people to types of content.  Mark said they also do a lot of experimentation on processes and incentives. Transparency increases participation. This has been my experience, as well.

Mark is committed to making change on a global scale, and is driving Imaginatik’s initiative to work with nonprofits and NGOs to tackle world problems, such as water, energy, poverty and waste. For some of these efforts, Imaginatik has received an award of Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum.