User:Ozaneken/The Innovation Engine

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The Innovation Engine Rite-Solutions had created Mutual Fun for its own use, but found it to be so powerful that the company wanted to license it as a product to others. The New York Times article generated a tremendous amount of interest in Mutual Fun, and the Rite-Solutions put on a series of day-long workshops for companies interested in learning more about it. Duncan was an executive with a consumer products company, with a large portfolio of products such as soaps and detergents. Her company was struggling to come up with new products. Duncan attended one of the Rite- Solutions seminars, and learned about the stock market game. However, she quickly realized that the game was just part of a culture of collaboration and creativity at Rite-Solutions. She wondered whether Mutual Fun would help enhance innovation at her company, and whether she could apply other lessons from Rite-Solutions within her company.

Mutual Fun Mutual Fun was created as a way of fostering trust, collaboration, and the ideas of employees throughout the company. While it was often referred to as a “game,” in reality, it was a powerful tool for innovation and employee involvement. It also served as a unifying structure to enhance the company culture, and to bring forth the benefits that the culture provided. It was launched in January 2005. Mutual Fun was an internal stock exchange, consisting of three markets: Savings Bonds, which were ideas that could save the company money or increase efficiency; “Bow Jones,” which consisted of ideas that utilized existing technology to create new products or services; and “Spazdaq,” which contained ideas of new technologies that the company should explore for potential future use. Like technologies that formed the basis for companies on the NASDAQ, some technologies worked well, and others not so well. The study of a new technology could lead to a decision to return to a proven technology rather than an emerging alternative. The “knowledge spasm” of investigating emerging technologies was worth the investment to the company and its knowledge base.

CONCLUSION Rite-Solutions had developed a tool, Mutual Fun, to help bring out and develop their employees’ ideas. The tool, however, was more than just a way of developing innovations. It was a tangible embodiment of a company culture of trust and collaboration.