Entuitive

Entuitive is a consulting engineering firm with a vision of bringing together engineering and intuition to enhance building performance.

Challenges

FINDING A SOLUTION TO IMPROVE FIRM ENGAGEMENT AND COLLABORATION

As a member of Entuitive’s internal innovation team, Blaine Jansen was looking for a way to get better outcomes from all the firm’s great ideas.

Entuitive wanted to build a culture that empowered the firm’s staff to be involved in their innovation process from start to finish. The problem was some of the firm’s systems were hindering his team’s ability to improve their processes and staff engagement.

“We took an old-school approach to a lot of the tools and processes we developed,” Blaine says. “In this case, we were using an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of our collaboration efforts and we knew that was limiting.”

Blaine’s hope was to increase the level of communication around the firm’s innovation efforts and increase the amount of collaboration on particular ideas.

“Before Output, it was difficult to measure employee participation and contributions because it was done manually and without enough data tracking,” says Blaine.

This lead the team on a search for a platform that would not only enable the firm to capitalize on their ideas but also offer guidance for improving their processes.

Solution

GUIDANCE AND STRATEGY IN ADDITION TO AN END-TO-END INNOVATION PLATFORM

Over the years, Entuitive had been forming their own problem-solving processes and figuring out what puzzle pieces they needed to build on their success.

One idea Entuitive’s team came up with was using software to crowdsource new ideas internally and develop a process for executing on them. During their search for a solution like this Entuitive connected with Output after learning about their point of view.

“There’s consistency in what success looks like for both of us, which is engaging large groups of people, moving quickly, and getting stuff done,” explains Blaine. “We liked Output’s approach to innovation—other providers were just providing a platform.”

Entuitive looked at other solutions, but they all seemed to fall short after the idea phase of innovation, without support for development, validation, and implementation. They were looking for a platform with an agile approach to problem-solving.

Blaine says, “The other teams we were looking at didn’t necessarily agree with our approach, so it felt like there was additional value Output brought to the table in terms of their understanding of innovation.”

Output learned as much as possible about how Entuitive operated—what was working well and what needed to change. Some of Entuitive’s existing processes would need to be mapped onto their platform, which included migrating the ideas they had been tracking on Excel.

Entuitive’s team was also looking for guidance with their internal innovation program, as well as developing and implementing ideas they prioritized.

“Output was willing to work with us to come up with an arrangement that was beneficial to both parties,” Blaine says. “That led us to bring them in from the service side, acting as a consultant to help us define some of these real problems.”

Results

LESS WASTED TIME, MORE ENGAGEMENT, AND BETTER DECISION-MAKING

One of the first Entuitive projects to be developed and implemented using Output was an always-on webcam system across their seven offices so employees around the world always feel connected.

“Output has played a key role in helping us become efficient in deciding both what and how we’ll innovate as a team,” says Blaine.

Entuitive is now able to track current challenges, projects, and weekly trends, as well as engagement metrics like active users, comments, and votes cast.

Blaine says, “Using Output, we have access to data that helps us remain agile in our engagement strategy—things like what kind of content is resonating with our teams, and trends in how our people engage during each stage of an idea.”

Entuitive is no longer wasting valuable time manually tracking their ideas in spreadsheets. All of their innovation efforts are done with the same tool and their ideas are tracked digitally. Now they’re able to focus on more important goals like improving engagement.

“We had some idea challenges with very low participation, and now we think our timing and internal promotion could have been tweaked. Before we wouldn’t have known what was successful and what wasn’t,” says Blaine.

Pleasantly surprised with the new platform features Output is consistently adding, Blaine is also looking forward to growing with Output’s platform.

“A lot these platforms get stagnant after a while, but with Output we’ve seen a number of new improvements and some of them actually feel like they’re tailored to some of our asks. That level of collaboration will become increasingly important to us as our engagement rates go up.”

After working with Output’s team over the past year they’ve become an extension of Entuitive’s internal innovation team, providing advice and guidance when they need it.

Blaine says, “The team at Output is interested in understanding what success means for you and how they can contribute to that success. They’re not just selling a platform, they want to be involved in what change looks like in your organization.”

“With Output we have access to the kind of information we just had no idea about before.”