Managers at Work: Managing Front-End Innovation through Idea Markets at Novozymes

Online collaboration is a powerful tool for boosting idea generation in large corporations. However, management may experience an overload of proposals from employees. To improve front-end innovation, the Danish industrial biotech company Novozymes implemented an internal idea competition in which a relatively small number of highly motivated participants screened their colleagues' inventions through an "idea market." The idea competition fulfilled its goals of generating two ideas with high growth potential within a short time, uncovering and recombining old proposals that inventors had not previously been able to advance in the organization and focusing managerial attention on the selection process. The campaign is an effective tool to recombine existing knowledge that had not been utilized. The process demonstrated that asking participants to comment on proposals improves idea generation and screening and that active involvement of R&D management is a key success factor in any idea competition.