InnovateIn

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  Solution Generation and Sharing to combat Covid19 Challenges

Inspiration

The unprecedented Covid 19 situation left the entire world under lockdown. For some it meant work from home but for many it has influenced their lifestyle, their earnings and freedom.

In our organization, Novel Coronavirus created a void where we could not bring all under the “work from home” category due to technological constraints. Hence the conceptualization of “Vitual Innova”, an internal initiative to keep our employees engaged and utilize their time effectively to generate ideas to help both engagement and value add to our customers.

The campaign was a success with over 248 ideas generated over 2 days within a span of 300 employees. The two categories for the ideas were ‘Value Add’ and ‘Simplify’ and many ideas were around sustaining business models during the time of Covid 19.

This inspired us to think of how an idea generation tool ‘InnovateIn’ would help similar businesses to both engage and generate solutions.

What it does

Innovation has always been used as a strategic tool to create more effective and efficient processes, products and ideas.

It also conveys with it an engagement quotient and shows that you value your employees thoughts and ideas. With the digital age that we are in where both millennials and baby boomers are technologically savvy it is important the businesses move onto technological platforms like mobile applications.

InnovateIn is a mobile based application which will have the functionalities for business owners to run idea generation campaigns as per the need of the hour.

For instance right now with covid 19 impacting businesses, direct employees who are in touch with customers would know their pulse and can come up with innovative solutions for our customers.

The tool is reusable and can also be used to identify solutions for any other problems that businesses may face.

Moving this up a notch, the tool would be modelled similar to a social platform where other businesses can subscribe to the application and filter ideas based on lines of business’s and find solutions to common problems.

How I built it

One of the key challenges that we faced was around technological constraints, we needed to build an interface but did not have anyone within our team who possessed the required skill sets.

Eventually after a lot of research and online learning the prototype was created by one of our team members who learned the entire process overnight, and created it with Glide.

There is still a lot of work required in the actual construction of the application but currently we have a prototype which should convey how we plan to make a difference to businesses and customers who have been affected adversely during Covid 19.

Challenges I ran into

The concept is innovative in itself but the challenges that we faced as a team was in application development and with narrowing down the scope of the application to ensure that it is relevant in our current environment.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The evolution of our idea from a simple campaign that we conducted during the Covid 19 lock down for our employees to a mobile application to support businesses is something that we are proud of as a team. The prototype that was created by our team who has no experience in application development has made us realize that hard work and passion go a long way.

What I learned

This was our first time participating in a Hackathon and the learnings were immense. Being able to link in with mentors with such varied and incredible skill sets has equipped us better in our journey. We are also very proud to be a part of this global initiative working united in our drive towards solving challenges caused by the Covid 19 situation.

What's next for InnovateIn

We are excited to be a part of Hackathon and want to be able to scale this application to make it accessible to both small as well as large business units. The prototype needs to be made into an actual working mobile application so that is our next step in this journey.

During COVID 19 the application will cater to businesses, employees and employers to have a common platform for crowd sourcing ideas that others can take away to implement in their own areas.

However we believe that in a world post COVID 19 our application would still be relevant. Our vision is to move the application into a subscription model and to expand into business's, communities, schools etc.

Our long term plan is to explore opportunities to make InnovateIN an ecommerce platform for solutions(intellectual property)