Talent Marketplaces can enable a culture of innovation. They enable organizations to launch and manage initiatives / gigs and resource them with cross-functional teams. This can be leveraged by organizations to explore and experiment new ideas while infusing excitement for new projects in the employees.
Talent Marketplaces can drive 3 specific improvements around innovation:
1. Increase participation in innovation programs like Hackathons
2. Increase agility and the number of pockets of start-up culture
3. Increase the number of moonshots that are launched
Increase participation in innovation programs like Hackathons
Innovation programs like Hackathons are interesting and provide an opportunity for people across an organization to step out of their daily activities to seed innovative improvements / products. At present, these are usually run as a 2 or 3 day program one or more times in a year. Ideally, for these innovation programs to produce truly ground breaking products or services, they should be run more widely and regularly across the entire organization.
With a talent marketplace, innovation programs can run throughout the year and allow people across functions and geographies to get together and collaborate. The results can be shared more widely and taken forward more meaningfully beyond the seed stage. Participants feel encouraged to continue developing the shortlisted ideas since the 360 feedback from their virtual team working on the innovation ideas can be seamlessly incorporated by the talent marketplace into the regular performance assessment.
Increase agility and the number of pockets of start-up culture
When you walk into a start-up’s office, you can often feel the positive energy, vibrancy and dynamism in the air. If you walk into a large organization, you often don’t feel the same. This is understandable.
Of late, you hear a lot of business and HR leaders at these large organizations talk about introducing start-up agility. This is because the leaders rely on their people to develop products and services to effectively respond to the start-ups that are disrupting their industries. However, a large organization cannot suddenly transform it’s entire global operations to operate like a start-up, And this is ok given the above objective to effectively compete with start-ups on new projects while at the same time operating the existing business effectively.
What these organizations need are pockets of start-up culture within to develop truly ground breaking innovations that can compete with the start-ups. Talent Marketplaces can help by creating better visibility and connectivity across the organization. Boundaries are shrunk; people can come together quickly across functions and geographies to brainstorm on ideas and develop them out further with agility. Some of these innovations may strengthen market position by enabling existing businesses to be run more profitably while other pockets focus on developing new products / services,
Increase the number of moonshots that are launched
Moonshots are aptly named given the high risk of failure and the unparalleled benefit / transformative impact if successful. With technology fueling disruption of industries at unprecedented speeds, Moonshots are no longer a luxury. Organizations that want to lead in future will need to transform / disrupt their own industry. However, in most organizations, there aren’t enough Moonshots in-flight to achieve this.
Given the outlandish nature of venture attempted in a moonshot and the associated risk of failure, most Moonshots just remain as ideas in the minds of individuals and do not see the light of day. With a talent marketplace, the organization increases the possibility for more Moonshots to get out of the minds of employees and get worked on by various teams. This is done by enabling people to launch initiatives that can be made visible to the rest of the organization. The idea originator can get richer feedback to either improve the idea or to highlight reasons why it may not work. And then bring together relevant expertise / skills plus available capacity to rapidly test the Moonshot.
While there is no guarantee for success, the higher number of Moonshots launched will increase the probability of a success that transports the organization far ahead of its competitors.
