Enel crowdsourcing with Eidos Market

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'We appeal to your imagination, inventiveness and entrepreneurial spirit: through your contribution we can build the Enel of the future, the best company in the world,' said Enel CEO Fulvio Conti to Enel's employees as he unveiled Eidos Market, the business' new innovation crowdsourcing system.

Accessible to the more than 71,000 employees in the 40 countries where the Group operates, the Eidos Market project is based on a bottom-up approach to innovation that will enable all Enel employees to participate in the business' process of innovation, submitting and selecting ideas and proposals regarding projects.

This global project will focus initially on four challenges: individual roles for Health and Safety, the improvement of professional performance, the environment and customer contact. Ideas sent in by colleagues will be published on the website, which will allow anyone to comment on them, improve on them with their own contribution and offer an assessment through virtual investment mechanism.

Participants can invest Eidos virtual credits in the ideas presented on Eidos Market which they feel to be the most promising prospect for the business. By sending in ideas, commenting on them and investing in them you can accumulate Eidos points, which can be used to win gadgets in an auction that will be held at the end of each campaign. The ideas that receive the most support through investments will be selected and looked over by an assessment team who will decide which ones to realise.

With Eidos everyone will be able to take part in building the Enel of tomorrow. Every contribution is valuable, be it an idea, a comment or an opinion. Today we are adding another piece to the puzzle of innovation, in which we can all play an active role.

The project was unveiled during the Open Innovation in Large Companies: Unlocking the Power of Workforce Passion conference that Enel promoted alongside the Enel Foundation Centre of Study and took place on 20 February in Rome.

This is an idea shared by Luigi Nicolais, president of Italy's National Council of Research, who confirmed that 'today Open Innovation is a necessity: we can only make advances through interacting with other people', while according to Erez Tsalik, senior Facilitator and Director, Systematic Inventive Thinking Operations for Asia Pacific, 'innovation means thinking and acting differently, in a useful and effective fashion', and that in a large business innovation needs to both become part of the system and be based on three things: 'the availability of results, the right tools and the right structure'.

Alberto Di Minin, from the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies and Adviser for Innovation to the ex-Italian Minister of Education, Universities and Research, closed the event by going over the story of Open Innovation and its new priorities: 'The central importance of science and technology, the role of business and institutions, the importance of people and their skills, crowdsourcing and case studies in a wide range of sectors'.