Susan Andrews, Head of Innovation, Citi

Category
  • Future of Work
The Project

In the fall of 2011 Citi launched a ‘Future of Banking’ global challenge, encouraging all employees from around the world to contribute their ideas to deliver best-in-class products and services to our customers.  The challenge was deployed on a crowd-sourcing ideation platform, powered by Spigit, called Citi Ideas. The platform allowed employees to submit their ideas, collaborate virtually with colleagues around the world, and vote on the ideas they thought would have the biggest impact for Citi.

The Technology

Spigit

Metrics Matter

1. Before this project, Citi did not have a scalable way for employees to exchange ideas with colleagues outside their regions or departments.  By the end of this campaign, nearly 50,000 employees from 97 countries had participated, producing more than 2,300 ideas to help define the Future of Banking for Citi.

2. The challenge dramatically reduced product development time.  Typically, a new product concept has a development lifecycle of 18-24 months.  In this case, the concept was prototyped rapidly and brought to an equivalent stage in just 10 weeks.  

Disruptive Factor

The Citi Ideas global challenge introduced new ways of working across boundaries and busted through business and regional siloes.  More than 100 employees across a range of businesses, functions and geographies contributed to refining the winning idea.   Virtual teams formed organically to collaborate, tapping into the collective genius of people from all levels in the organization, turning the standard “top down” hierarchy on its side.

Shining Moment

The Citi Ideas challenge engaged tens of thousands of employees.  When we realized that participants were logging on during the weekends and at night, we knew that we had captured the imagination of the company. Employees were collaborating with dozens, in some cases hundreds, of their global colleagues by providing their unique expertise and diverse perspectives .  Additional employee feedback indicated that one of the most compelling aspects of the challenge was that the organizational hierarchy became non-existent -- Business CEOs, junior analysts, and seasoned veterans were able to collaborate to build and refine idea concepts.