TIM
The challenge
TIM Open Innovation is TIM Group's Open Innovation program that fosters business opportunities with innovative companies.
TIM has a long tradition of fostering both internal and external innovation, from managing Corporate Intrapreneurship programs to Open Innovation initiatives.
To better manage their innovation programs, TIM’s Innovation teams needed to:
- Centrally manage the various innovation flows proposed by TIM
- Create a space accessible to all stakeholders involved in innovation processes: The innovation team, startups, scaleups, TIM employees, TIM partners
- Create a single database with the information of all the different stakeholders
- Create a space for TIM employees where to unleash their ideas, alone or in a team, in the digital era.
The mission was to foster collaboration between TIM Group companies and ready-to-market startups, SMEs and scaleups with innovative solutions in line with TIM's business needs to help the company innovate its portfolio of products and solutions. The areas of interest for the program were Network, IoT, Cloud, AI,Cybersecurity, Sustainability.
As part of the initiative to create engagement with colleagues all over TIM, the Idea Garage was launched, an open call for ideas designed to listen to and feed brainstorming, to better understand the needs of the organization, attract ideas, and stimulate possible solutions to its most pressing problems.
The solution
With Skipso the company developed TIM Open Innovation, a platform that gave the company an opportunity to manage all its internal and external innovation programs, as well as all the different stakeholders involved in the programs.
A singular database was set up to store information of all the users involved in TIM and its partners' various innovation programs, allowing the company to build a powerful repository.
Furthermore, the platform allowed TIM to easily manage user types, allowing admins to modify access and visibility of information based on user type.
Tim Open Innovation currently hosts three innovation streams promoted by TIM and its partners:
- Continuous scouting to identify scaleups with innovative and sustainable solutions in response to the business needs of the TIM Group.
- Innovation programs to support the development of early stage, ready to market startups offering solutions in various topics, such as IoT, sustainability, Cloud and Artificial Intelligence
- A Corporate Intrapreneurship program to encourage TIM Group employees to develop business ideas, new products, services and sustainable business models in line with the company's strategic plans.
Key features include:
- Single Sign-On access that allows employees to login to the platform using their company credentials, ensuring a streamline user experience.
- Collection of proposed ideas
- Creation of joint teams for each idea
- Direct and private messaging, sharing, following
- Crowdvoting allowing for team collaboration
- Initial screening of ideas by the dedicated Support Team via super-like
- Final evaluation of best ideas by the DG committee via scorecards
- Selection of the most relevant ideas
- Creation of reports for each phase of the program
The results
The platform allowed TIM to collaborate on different projects with different strategic partners with great success.
With Skipso TIM has increased efficiencies in managing different internal and external innovation flows, by managing all program and data on one single platform.
In the first 6 months of the launch of the program TIM has launched 4 external challenges, had over 220 startups register to the platform and over 130 startups have participated in the challenges. Within a year it has launched an external challenge engaging colleagues from all over TIM.
Stakeholders were also invited to the platform to review and evaluate external applications and internal ideas through a streamlined evaluation process via functionalities like crowd voting and scorecards. Evaluation reports were provided during each phase of evaluation to help identify the best proposals.
TIM also saw a high engagement rate for the internal innovation program, with over 26000 active users and with over 300 ideas submitted. The crowdvoting will enable 60% of these ideas to pass over to the next Design phase, while the dedicated Support Team will identify the remaining 40% of ideas that will continue the path in the evaluation funnel. Finally, the DG committee will select a maximum of 5 best ideas. For each of them a Sponsor will be assigned who will support their implementation. The selected ideas will be celebrated, awarded and implementation will start.
The company is building TIM Open Innovation as an institutional innovation platform that will help the organization manage all of its future initiatives.
