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Enhanced Ideation
Crowe have captured and submitted 200+ ideas in edison365.
Improved Visibility
Optimized ideation and innovation from the ground up.
Inclusive Innovation
Crowe have created an inclusive innovation culture.
Meet Crowe UK 👋
Crowe UK is a leading audit, tax, advisory and consulting firm with a national presence to complement their international reach.
They care about their clients and their people, building trusted and long-lasting relationships; creating opportunities to help clients to meet their goals and provide a rewarding experience for their people.
This case study highlights how edison365 helped Crowe to improve visibility and collaboration within their innovation pipeline.
Faced with siloed ideas and limited visibility across offices, Crowe needed to turn valuable insights into actionable innovation. edison365 helped Crowe transform their way of working, centralizing processes and enhancing the overall ideation pipeline. This resulted in a scalable innovation culture where over 200 ideas have been submitted.
- 📍 United Kingdom
- 💼 Financial
- ⚙️ Innovation and PPM
Challenges
Speaking with Casey Aston, a Senior Executive in Crowe’s Client Solutions team, one thing was clear: this was an organization that values the opinions and ideas of its team, and those ideas were plentiful!
The problem? Many of these great “aha!” moments came from individual departments or offices around the UK.
Without the right visibility and transparency across the innovation pipeline, the UK offices were innovating in siloes. This created a challenge in prioritizing ideas and communicating them to the whole firm.
Ideation without momentum
Despite having the right ideas, Crowe simply needed to improve their processes and systems to track, share, and follow through with new initiatives.
This led Crowe to seek out a new way to capture, manage, and deliver new ideas – a way to take an end-to-end approach and really drive ideas within an organization that values innovation.
“We always knew our people had good ideas. The challenge was making them visible to everyone else.”
Solution
The challenges were clear, the solution, clearer! Crowe turned to edison365 to address its visibility. By rolling out edison365’s ideation capabilities across its organization, teams, and departments spanning several offices, they now had a way to collaborate on new ideas.
This gave every employee an opportunity to make change – a way to express new ideas and opportunities in one place. It took innovation from a local level to something scalable, inclusive, and transparent.
Using edison365, employees could submit new ideas, have them approved by the right people to put those ideas into practice. edison365 also supports gamified innovation, meaning leaderboards, point systems, and voting made ideation easier.
Describing the tools, Casey says: “It’s not a complex piece of software to use. It’s user friendly, so we haven’t had people struggling to get to grips with it.”
What was really happening?
- Crowe was able to set challenges with specific themes that aligned with their business objectives, making ideation results-driven.
- For the first time, teams across all offices were able to collaborate, approve, suggest, and most importantly, innovate together!
- The senior team really appreciated that edison365 wasn’t a rigid platform. It could be configured and customized to fit the way they work.
“The leaderboard has been popular. You don’t just raise something, and it disappears. People can track changes and see the progress of ideas.”
e-Credits and professional support 🤝
Using edison365, Crowe UK didn’t just “set and forget”, they invested in our Customer Success e-Credits packages; a wide range of packages tailored to help users achieve different goals and outcomes within our tools using the support of our friendly experts. This gave their team everything they needed from day one, helping them get the most out of edison365’s innovation tools.
“We’ve used the e-credits for things like weekly support calls, onboarding, and troubleshooting. It’s been really helpful to have that option.”
The sessions held with Rob Toon weren’t just about technical support; they helped guide Casey and her team at Crowe through the best ideation management practices, reporting setups, and more.
“It’s good that you can use them in different ways. If we didn’t need the weekly calls, we could use them for reports or more detailed training. That adaptability is important.”
In a nutshell, the support of our e-Credits packages helped Crowe save time at the outset and create a sustainable environment for new ideas to grow!
Results
The results Crowe has experienced from integrating edison365 into its innovation process have been both practical and cultural. Firstly, more than 200 ideas have been submitted across the firm, all tackling key challenges and opportunities the organization wants to address!
Employees also have visibility of their ideas and the status of their suggestions, while key stakeholders can approve ROI-driven opportunities first. This level of transparency sends a positive message to the wider firm.
“Our senior managers like being able to see engagement from everyone in one place. It shows what people care about and where the energy is.”
It demonstrates teams and departments that ideas are taken seriously, and there’s a process and structure behind innovation that is clear and manageable for all.
Talking of teams and departments, cross-functional collaboration has flourished at Crowe. Ideas from local offices are no longer under the radar or brainstormed in siloes. Casey highlights this: “Everyone is able to have their say and this is really beneficial.”
Casey puts this perfectly, stating: “edison365 gives us the ability to really visualise that… to show someone we’ve listened, we’re going to invest in your idea, and this is how it’s progressing.”
Looking ahead, Crowe plans to bring project portfolio management into one edison365, bridging the gap between new ideas and innovation projects. This will develop the visibility of ideas and the wider pipeline.
We’d like to take the opportunity to thank Casey Aston and Crowe for helping us put this story together – a story that highlights just how far the right tools can take the right ideas when used by an organization that cares about its people, and the importance of innovation.
