2018 – Highlights from a Year of Innovation | Crowdicity

As 2018 draws to a close, here are some of the highlights of a great year for Crowdicity, as chosen by members of our team around the world.

Launching the Department of Health #TalkHealthAndCare Community

Introduced by Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, DHSCWorkforce set out to prove that the best place to find suggestions on how to improve care delivery in the NHS is by asking the caregivers and patients themselves. The Secretary of State has spearheaded this initiative for the start and here is the video he recorded to inspire people to contribute.

Beginning work with the Bank of England and launching Future Forum

Aiming to encourage discussion on the “Future of Money” the Bank of England Future Forum, featuring a video introduction from Governor Mark Carney, is engaging the UK population to gain views on key financial questions. There are also some fun banking challenges – such as suggestions for which character to feature on the new £50 note.

Our Innovation Event in Sydney, Australia

Organised by the team in our Sydney office, the theme of the event was Innovation Culture & Empowering Your Crowd and it was run with our Australia innovation partner, Inventium.

Introduced by Sam Curtin, Crowdicity’s Regional Director of APAC, and featuring presentations from Inventium and Crowdicity CEOs, the success of the event was assured by the sharing of stories of the individual innovation journeys from each of our customers represented on the day: ABC, Woodside Energy, Swinburne University of Technology, University of Technology Sydney, and Transport for NSW. This was the perfect primer for the 170 attendees from 50+ companies across sectors including banking, utilities, universities, manufacturers and technology companies from both Australia and New Zealand.

The event was planned, organised, and delivered in just two months and was cited as one of the highlights of the year by many of us, including Erdem Yilmaz one of the newest members of the Crowdicity (an account manager in APAC) who commented:

“Within my first month at Crowdicity, I had the pleasure of being involved with the first event we put together in Australia. The room was full of some of the brightest minds across Australia’s largest organisations and almost all of them were completely captivated by the stories our clients had to share (and taking notes!). Personally, being new to the crowdsourcing and innovation space, it really validated the value and impact of what we do.”

Seeing ABC’s ideas come to life!

It was at the innovation event in Sydney that Leisa Bacon, Director of Audiences at The Australian Broadcasting Corporation shared the news that two new services had already been launched as outputs from the the Great Innovation Grant, a $50 million dollar ideas competition open to all ABC employees with a mission to crowdsource the future of TV, radio and internet programs development: ABC Life and ABC Kids Listen.

Winning Westpac Banking Corporation as a customer

More than six months in the making and involving a superb joined-up effort by our sales, account management, technology, and support team members around the world, this shows that even though we are still very much a start-up we are able to meet the rigorous demands of leading financial institutions and deliver trusted enterprise-level services, on a global scale.

Opening our country-specific SaaS platform in Australia

Setting up and launching an instance of the Crowdicity Idea and Innovation Management platform is Australia now makes it even easier for government organisations to work with us, as we meet the necessary standards for doing business: including data being hosted solely in Australia with government accredited service provider, AWS.

A well-deserved promotion

Michelle (Shelly) Eggleston’s promotion to Director of Customer Success APAC was a highlight of the year for Rob King our VP of Sales, Sam Curtin (Shelly’s line manager) and me (I was fortunate to be there when we gave her the good news). Rob King gives a good account of why we promoted Michelle:

“Shelly is a huge part of Crowdicity’s growth in APAC and Crowdicity as a whole, her work ethic and character are an inspiration to us all”. And Sam sums it up Shelly’s achievement perfectly: “Going from a client success consultant to a manager, and then to a director in less than 3 years with no experience in the industry.”

Continuing to help Law Firms drive innovation

We’ve been working with legal practices all around the world for several years now, but 2018 saw some big milestones for us.

Maddocks is an Australian legal firm dedicated to innovation at the heart of what they do through their ‘MaddX’ innovation strategy. This year they launched Madd Ideas, a crowdsourcing community designed to gather, promote and rate ideas from across the firm.

Here’s a video featuring Maddox Innovation Partner Shaun Temby and Crowdicty’s Michelle Eggleton talking about Madd Ideas and how Crowdicity was chosen to power this initiative.

And to sum it all up in Shelly’s own words:

“We are proud to have worked with Maddocks to help them with their innovation strategy. It’s been incredible to witness how effectively and quickly they’ve leveraged Crowdicity’s technology to build a culture of innovation, bring value to their clients and futureproof their firm.”

In the UK, amongst others, we were delighted to sign Freshfields as a customer, and CMS – a long-standing client – launched their highly successful #hacks innovation portal, powered by Crowdicity. The launch of #hacks follows the setting up earlier this year of CMS By Design, a new group within the firm responsible for delivering the future of legal service design, delivery and technology to clients.

Each quarter the firm will run three ‘challenges’ – questions on topics relating to the way the firm works, its culture, and how it delivers legal services to clients. Anyone at CMS can submit an idea either a ‘quick win’ – which the firm can realistically make happen within weeks, or a ‘big idea’ – which will require investment or more time to implement.

Incentives will include an opportunity for seven people to head to the US West Coast to explore tech, innovation and entrepreneurship.

Stephen Millar, Managing Partner at CMS, commented:

“If you ask people to come up with an idea or to be more innovative, they often get stuck or think they have to invent something entirely new and ground-breaking. In fact, it’s lots of small improvements that incrementally help businesses become more innovative. But we’re also after those big, ambitious ideas too and those don’t necessarily come from Partners.”

A Crowdicity baby arrives!

Beatrix Curtin was born in December. The daughter of Julia (Jules) Curtin, Sales Director EMEA.

Staff who left us came home

Not naming names, but we had our first instances of staff that we were sorry to see leave return to our sales and engineering teams. Apparently they missed us as much as we missed them!