Crowdfunding inside the enterprise: employee-initiatives for innovation and collaboration

We describe a first experiment in enterprise crowdfunding - i.e., employees allocating money for employee-initiated proposals at an Intranet site, including a trial of this system with 511 employees in IBM Research. Major outcomes include: employee proposals that addressed diverse individual and organizational needs; high participation rates; extensive inter-departmental collaboration, including the discovery of large numbers of previously unknown collaborators; and the development of goals and motivations based on collective concerns at multiple levels of project groups, communities of practice, and the organization as a whole. We recommend further, comparative research into crowd-funding and other forms of employee-initiated innovations.

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