Innovation at Intuit: Brainstorm
This week’s Bay Area CIO IT Executives Meetup Group focused on innovation at Intuit — the folks that bring us TurboTax, Quicken, and QuickBooks. Tad Milbourn, our presenter, is the lead on their Brainstorm project. Tad described the inception of Brainstorm as an internal innovation itself, the development of Brainstorm for supporting innovation at Intuit, and now how Brainstorm is becoming a product for the rest of us. (For more on Brainstorm, including screenshots, please also see Bill Ives’ post.)
Tad Milbourn
Tad and his colleagues were relatively new to Intuit and looking for a way to spend their “10% unstructured” time. They noted that Intuit had an innovation tool — but that it was built for executive reporting, not for innovators. They also noted that from 1998 to 2007, Intuit had an innovation rate of 4 per year. This didn’t sound like a good innovation environment to them.
The Brainstorm story is an example of systems savvy and ongoing TOP Management — and goes to show that you don’t have to have decades of experience to have savvy. They saw that the current tool wasn’t a fit to the innovators’ needs, nor Intuit’s values around tools, culture, and process. They had the motivation to give it a go. They managed the technology, organization, and people. (For an example of what could have happened if they didn’t practice TOP Management, see this post.) It was by tying these issues together that they built a solid platform and were able to engage innovators from around the world and across functional areas.
They were innovators building a tool for other innovators. They knew that such a tool would need to:
- Get insights from all over the company, not just within obvious silos
- Grow ideas
- Find and link together people with needed skills — and not just skills that formally showed up via title or job experience.
- Keep the energy alive through on-going conversations, notifications of edits and comments, the ability to follow a person, idea, or tag
- Get management attention when the time is right
- …and still work within standard operating procedures (you can submit ideas via email as well as through the web tool)
They also knew that every idea is different and that the idea’s “space” would need to be easily customizable. They built in modules that can be linked together like Legos (e.g., a to-do list, a calendar, a list of team members — similar to the self-design possible in a Google Site).
The new tool even meets the executive reporting needs better than did the old one. The data is more realistic in that it is more tightly tied to the reality of the innovation’s progress. Innovation leaders within each group can see a dashboard of activity, giving them real-time understanding of innovation progress.
Final result: Tad reports that ideation is up 1000%, participation in innovation is up 500%, and they are running a rate of 20+ innovations/year (versus 4). They now have two external clients using Brainstorm. At one client they gained 40% adoption in 6 weeks.
TweetTags: Intuit
9 Responses
September 10th, 2009 at 10:55 am
Thanks for the post Terri. I think you captured the spirit of the talk…focus on the problem, not the technology and then build it in a way that people enjoy to use. Your TOP methodology is a nice pithy way to remember that.
One minor nitpick…there’s no direct calendaring capability in there. Thanks again!
September 10th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Tatyana Kanzaveli. Tatyana Kanzaveli said: Nice write up about Intuit’s Innovation management product: Brainstorm http://bit.ly/EGpJ8 [...]
September 20th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
[...] You can read more about this talk here. [...]
September 21st, 2009 at 10:13 am
Great article! Gives a deeper perspective as to how Intuit thrives on harnessing innovation and creative ideas.
January 4th, 2010 at 2:18 pm
[...] innovation is a distributed effort and whatever tools we use (push email, Twitter, Facebook, or a purpose-built innovation tool) should at least partially be tuned to maintain engagement across the [...]
February 15th, 2010 at 5:28 am
[...] build their own collaboration spaces (perhaps with Google Sites, Huddle, or within the enterprise, Brainstorm)? These are the questions my Managing Technology & Innovation students will be addressing in [...]
June 14th, 2010 at 12:06 am
[...] (JPL) and Tad Milbourn (Intuit) and I are doing to track the outcome of adding mobile access to Intuit’s Brainstorm innovation platform. Our data shows the basics of “how things are” now that Inuit has and uses the [...]
July 12th, 2010 at 4:00 pm
[...] also sounds a lot like the innovation approach Intuit is taking: As an innovation moves through Intuit’s Brainstorm process, innovators are asked to test hypotheses step-by-step. This is in contrast to an older approach [...]
August 1st, 2010 at 10:51 am
[...] limit disclosure of ideas. One reason I expect Intuit’s Brainstorm approach works is because it allows people to output their ideas in a variety of ways and stages of [...]