Wazoku: A New Perspective on Managing Ideas and the People Behind Them

I’ve known Simon Hill for many years, and I’ve always enjoyed our in-depth conversations about open talent and open innovation. Simon is one of the brightest thinkers in the open innovation space, so I was very fortunate to catch up with him to discuss his role as founder and CEO of Wazoku, an idea management and open innovation software and services company supporting the delivery of true innovation at scale capability.

Simon started Wazoku – which means great idea in the Swahili – in 2011 to align two powerful forces: the capacity of people to drive change and the power of technology to augment human impact. Earlier this year, the company took a giant step forward by acquiring InnoCentive, a US-based company that specializes in crowdsourcing solutions through open innovation and community expertise. Integrating a dynamic technology platform with global human knowledge created a powerful collaborative entity. “Wazoku is a one-stop-shop for solving problems and creating future opportunities, all under one brand,” Simon explained.?

“More specifically,” Simon added, “Wazoku allows enterprises to adopt a forward-thinking mindset by elevating innovation from sub-scale and low-impact peripheries and making it central to an organization’s operating model.” Wazoku’s Challenge Driven Enterprise aligns talent inside and outside of an organization to streamline new modes of innovation and leverage agility, efficiency, and speed to transform operations – from business strategy to the manufacturing plant floor – and create new business opportunities.??

Supporting Idea Structures and Resurfacing Value?

Simon recognized that in the high-speed global marketplace, many powerful ideas were not receiving the support and attention they required to blossom and create value. The human intellect and energy needed to advance innovative ideas lacked the structure and mechanisms essential to creating business realities. Simon believed ideas needed the same software platforms and technologies that drive other modern business initiatives, such as nurturing marketing leads into sales conversion opportunities and new customers.?

“Over the years businesses have built incredible technologies to promote sales automation and customer lifecycle management in marketing,” Simon said, “but very little for ideas. Innovation and engagement lie on the walls of organizations as their core values, but they’re actually doing little to live those values in any way, shape, or form to drive meaningful output.”

Wazoku was designed to evolve the way ideas are perceived and managed. That effort began with creating smart software that never forgets any idea, especially the ones that possess value but become lost in creative or bureaucratic processes. From his own experiences, Simon knows that asking people for ideas can generate 100 or 1,000 different responses and realities, but at the end of projects, only about 1% of those ideas will meet the mandated requirements. The remaining 99% of those ideas and creative revelations end up being discarded: erased from whiteboards, yanked from easel pads and stuck in a drawer or trash can – where they are never seen again. All of that work. All of that creativity. All of those ideas. Gone.?

Wazoku archives and resurfaces shelved or overlooked ideas for future brainstorms and problem-solving sessions. Businesses can be unaware they have already solved – or partially solved – a problem that they are currently struggling to resolve, oftentimes wasting significant money and resources in the process. Resurfacing ideas through reliable technology is like having a collective brain and memory that encompasses the collective value of employees and creative solutions.?

Innovative Ideas Can – And Should – Come from Anywhere

Ideas are not bound by job title, social status, or ancestry. Ideas come from people, who are a mix of their personal sensibilities, passions, and experiences. Businesses that seek innovative solutions must expand their understanding of how knowledge works in individuals and groups, and use that understanding to cultivate, implement, and scale ideas just as they would any other resource. In open talent marketplaces, however, human capital often exists in silos and fragmented processes.?

Wazoku expands knowledge sources and reduces friction by seamlessly managing overlooked and under-utilized talents and insights – especially those provided by internal employees, customer advocates, industry partners, and external problem solvers. When brainstorming, assembling a diverse alignment of perspectives, skills, talents, and life experiences are critical to creating unique and compelling ideas. Creative ideas are, after all, the ultimate competitive advantage.?

“If you don't engage the grassroots levels of your organization,” Simon explained, “in the digital transformation and innovation stories that you're trying to narrate – then you're probably doomed to failure.” In fact, Wazoku acquired Innocentive to address this unique and pressing challenge: catalyzing knowledge by integrating a powerful idea management system with a universal network of minds and perspectives.?

Simon elaborated: “The open innovation marketplace is a two-sided marketplace that matches corporate innovation challenges – which covers a whole range of different guises – with a global crowd of about 500,000 professional experts: solvers, innovators, inventors, tinkerers, and great people who have resolved great challenges over the years.” Open talent collaborations through Wazoku entail relatively low risks and high returns at remarkably high speeds. The challenge for Wazoku, however, is communicating this value to businesses still cautiously navigating the post-pandemic Zoom era. Many organizations have yet to embrace the power of a virtualized global R&D and tech scouting platform, frictionless idea management system, and asynchronous support tools. But I’m confident they will.?

As someone who has known Simon for a long time and who has personally witnessed his impact as a pioneer in the open talent industry, I know that Simon’s ideas often inhabit a place of opportunity that the rest of the business world is only just discovering. And with the purchase of InnoCentive, Wazoku is poised to usher in a new era of open talent innovations. I can’t wait to talk with Simon in the future and take a look back at where we were in 2021.?