Inspired Innovation - How Corel is Drawing Upon Employees' Ideas for User Focused Innovation

Abstract
There was a growing sense at Corel Corporation that we were losing touch with our tradition of innovation. In response, a team of people was brought together to look at how to empower every member of the department to contribute to the release of innovative, highly successful, and profitable products.

As a result, the following were developed: iFocus: a repository for information to educate and focus employees on the needs of the target markets; iCapture: a tool for collecting employees’ ideas that requires the ideas be expressed in terms of their benefits to the customer; and iCouncil: a group of people that manage the ideas submitted into iCapture and prepare them for harvesting by the product design teams.

This system is currently being used and ideas from iCapture are being tracked as they make their way through the product development process to possible implementation in the products.

Keywords
Interdisciplinary Design, Marketing/Market Research, Organizational Culture, Process Improvement, User- Centered Design.

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First presented at the conference on Designing for User eXperience, November 3-5, 2005, San Francisco, CA