Nosco field-guide

Field Guide to Idea Campaigns
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Designed by Nosco
Proofreading by Wordy
Illustrations by Menze Kwint
Typeset in Londrina, Cousine & Futura
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Published by Nosco, Copenhagen 2015
Printed in Denmark
© Nosco
Respect copyrights,
encourage creativity!
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visit Nos.co
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At Nosco, we work in idea management for global
companies. Our clients include Volkswagen, Novozymes,
BASF, Maersk and Volvo, to name just a few.
The cornerstone of our approach to idea management is
what we call idea campaigns.
Idea campaigns combine a goal-oriented approach with
online collaboration and place a premium
on user engagement.
Working closely with our clients, we’ve conducted
tons of campaigns, which have resulted in thousands
of ideas. And all along the way, we’ve scribbled down
notes, compiled best practices, checked out various
tools and made many checklists, all of which we make
use of every time we conduct a new idea campaign.
We call this toolset the Field Guide to Idea
Campaigns, and now, here, you have it too. With this
book at hand, you will be able to design, plan and
conduct campaigns and hopefully become a rock star
idea campaign manager.
We hope you find this guide valuable and we hope that
you will go on to create some amazing idea campaigns.
INTRODUCTION
Jesper & Oliver
founders, Nosco

8 9
ABOUT CAMPAIGNS
Seeing as you are about to become an idea
campaign manager, it’s important to first get a clear
picture of what a campaign actually is.
The word “campaign” is a military expression
derived from the Latin word campus, meaning “open
field”, which described what Roman armies would mostly
do in summer time.
Namely, that they would go out into the fields and fight
planned battles.
The going out part is key here.
Regardless of whether a campaign is a military one,
or whether it’s about politics, marketing or getting
valuable ideas, it’s about getting out there,
with one clear goal.
Adding the campaign element to idea
generation and idea management results
in three amazing qualities:
GOAL ORIENTATION
Campaigns are by definition goal oriented,
thus taking away a lot of the fuzziness normally
attributed to front-end innovation.
CROWD INVOLVEMENT
Campaigns are great for getting large groups
of people to dedicate themselves towards
one shared objective.
ENERGY
Campaigns are limited in scope and time.
This ensures passion, drive and creative energy.

Think about your company as one big, collective,
brain. Your aim is to get the company’s neurons to
make as many connections as possible, in order to get
the quality of ideas to a much higher level than any
one individual could attain.
This happens when you manage to get people engaged.
We are big fans of Stanford Professor B.J. Fogg, who
devised a simple yet profound theory about behaviour
and engagement in online systems.
He basically stipulates that engagement is a function
of accessibility and motivation.
This model has proven great for understanding both
failure and success in idea campaigns. Use it as a
reference to make sure you give your campaign the best
odds of resulting in ideas that really create value.
A great example of the Fogg Behavior Model is related
to internet connectivity.
Having access to the Internet is a
high-motivation/low-accessibility phenomenon.
LET ENGAGEMENT
BE YOUR PILOT
12
People will go out of their way to get internet
access, like working on highly complicated settings
on broken Wi-Fi routers, going to coffee shops they’d
never normally visit, to entering tedious long
passwords on their phones to get access.
We go out of our way to get internet access.
In comparison, while we will do our outmost to make
an idea campaign as motivating as possible, it’s not
very likely that your participants will go far out of
their way to participate.
Therefore, we also need to make it as easy and
accessible as possible – that’s where the
platform comes into play.
Furthermore, our participants will often need to be
nudged, with reminders and other communication means,
to participate. These are what Professor Fogg calls
“Triggers”. That’s where the idea campaign manager,
comes into the picture. In the final part of the Field
Guide, you’ll see a version of the Fogg Behavior
Model, applied to idea campaings.
13

14 15
Idea campaigns generally comprise three components:
the call for ideas, the campaign platform and
campaign outreach.
THE ANATOMY OF AN
IDEA CAMPAIGN
THE CAMPAIGN PLATFORM
This where the battle takes place. This
is where participants interact
and collaborate.
CAMPAIGN OUTREACH
This is about the actions, both online
and offline, you take as the campaign
manager. It’s about the communication
that takes place before, during and
after the campaign.
THE CALL FOR IDEAS
Communicate what type of ideas you want
from the campaign, and why you are
asking for them.
Let’s go through these in turn.

17
The call for ideas is the message
of your campaign.
A good call for ideas can make a world of
difference, so take time to prepare
it and get it right.
Here are some guidelines
1
THE CALL FOR IDEAS

18
STEP 1
START BY ASKING YOURSELF: WHY?
The initial part of an idea campaign involves
sitting down, often in a group, cutting away all the
bloat, and getting down to the essential reason for
running this campaign at this time.
You might be familiar with the concept of
“Starting with why” in a popular TED Talk and book
by Simon Sinek, otherwise we recommend Googling it.
In fact at Nosco, we often start workshops about
idea campaigns with a slide that just says “Why?” in
big type. This can be a great conversation-starter.

20
STEP 2
GETTING DOWN TO: BUSINESS
We call this the magic question, and it is
deceptively simple:
‘What is the specific and important
business problem we need to solve?’
Don’t try to solve all your problems with one
campaign. Be specific. And after you’ve gotten
specific, ask yourself, can you be even more specific?
In our experience, highly focused campaigns result
in ideas that campaign owners find more relevant,
implementable and hence valuable.
STEP 3
TURN YOUR ‘WHY?’ INTO A
CALL FOR IDEAS
When you let participants know exactly what kinds
of ideas are sought after in your campaign, you
drastically enhance your odds of getting actionable
results from the campaign.
The most important thing is getting to a point where
you’re absolutely clear on the objective of your
idea campaign.

- JEFF BEZOS
FOUNDER, AMAZON.COM
‘I think frugality drives
innovation, just like other
constraints do.
One of the only ways to
get out of a tight box is to
invent your way out.’

25
This might sound counterintuitive, but trust us,
your idea campaign will benefit from adding a few
constraints to your call for ideas.
Few things are more clearly communicated than
setting clear criteria that the ideas sought after
in the campaign must meet or somehow
take into consideration.
You can achieve this by defining a set of steps, i.e.
an idea template, for the participants to fill out
when submitting a new idea.
In our experience, there is a direct correlation
between the success of an idea campaign and the
level of constraints included in the call for ideas.
CONSTRAINTS SPARK
CREATIVITY
24
1IDEAS MUST GENERATE
SAVINGS OF AT LEAST 15%.
2
IDEAS MUST BE
IMPLEMENTABLE USING THE
COMPANY'S CURRENT
TECHNOLOGY.
3IDEAS MUST COST LESS THAN
US$ 1,000 TO IMPLEMENT.

26
THE DOGME 95
MOVEMENT:
EMBRACING CONSTRAINTS
Constraints are not your enemy.
Quite the opposite, they can accelerate the idea
generating process and add a great deal of creativity.
An example is the Dogme 95 movement, which created a
film-making genre based on the concept of constraints.
The Dogme movement (dogme is the Danish word for
dogma) is the story about a small Danish film company
that took constraints to a whole new level.
It is said that the “why” of Dogme 95 was actually
about finding a way to make ten movies for the price of
one. They saved money on photography, sets, costumes,
even dialogue. Instead, the constraints led them to
focus on one thing alone: the story.
And when everything else became more or less
irrelevant, it only enhanced the story even more.
Dogme 95 was officially disbanded in 2005, but not
before the films, such as The Idiots, The Celebration
and Mifune’s Last Song, went on to win some of the
most prestigious awards in the film industry at film
festivals in Cannes and Berlin, to name but two.

28
THE FOUR MIND MODES
Having described the why of your campaign, it’s now
time to find the what. Namely, what are we going to get
out of the campaign?
It’s not enough to simply say ‘I want ideas’ here.
In our research, we’ve found that idea campaigns fall
into one of four categories, each one asking the
participant to think in different ways.
We call these The Four Mind Modes.
Accompanying these four mind modes are different types
of campaigns, as you’ll see in the model on
the next page.

30
Crowdsourcing for new ideas for products and
processes represents the most prevalent use of idea
campaigns in organisations.
When asking users to enter this mind mode, you are
asking for creativity first of all. And since most
innovation also deals with existing products or
processes, you are also asking participants to make
use of their knowledge.
You can give creativity great conditions when you
introduce constraints. Therefore, introducing
constraints is highly recommended in these
idea campaigns.
As idea campaigns often revolve around an existing
product, service or process, it’s also a good idea
to mention specific areas where participants can
draw on their own knowledge and experience.
Detailed case studies from Velux, Pentax, LEGO and
Visma are available at nos.co/fieldkit
MIND MODE NO. 1:
INNOVATION
IDEA CAMPAIGNS THAT LEAD TO CREATION

32
Idea campaigns also serve as a platform for
targeted knowledge sharing.
When getting participants into this mind mode,
make sure you state that you are looking for their
concrete knowledge and experience; otherwise, it
will likely turn into a brainstorm – people love to
brainstorm!
The famous Australian surfer brand Billabong ran an
idea campaign to increase sales during Christmas.
Even though many stores performed well, there was
no sharing of ideas or experience between stores,
so Billabong started a campaign with the aim being
for stores to share best practices on how to exploit
sales and promotion opportunities during Christmas.
The whole Billabong case study is available at
nos.co/fieldkit
MIND MODE NO. 2:
KNOWLEDGE SHARING
IDEA CAMPAIGNS THAT LEAD TO ACTION

35
Direction campaigns are used as a tool for
collaborative strategising.
The CEO from one of our clients once said it best:
‘The people in the field know the market better than
me, the guys in the factory know the product better
than me and the supporters know the customers better
than me - why shouldn’t I make the most of that?’
To help out with these aspects, idea campaigns can
be deployed to harness the collective knowledge of
the whole team, department or company in order to
get networked input before making decisions at a
tactical or strategic level.
Detailed cases from Danfoss and Novozymes are
available at nos.co/fieldkit
MIND MODE NO. 3:
STRATEGY AND ANCHORING
IDEA CAMPAIGNS THAT LEAD TO DIRECTION

37
Setting up idea campaigns to solve problems allows
you to engage the “wisdom of the crowds”
within and outside the company in order to solve
concrete problems.
Companies like Innocentive connect companies with
large crowds of experts, who are offered prizes to
solve problems, typically in engineering, design
and sciences.
Inside companies, idea campaigns can be used to
encourage specialists to share ideas and knowledge
for all kinds of problems.
MIND MODE NO. 4:
PROBLEM SOLVING
IDEA CAMPAIGNS THAT LEAD TO SOLUTIONS

38 39
PREPARE THE CHECKLIST
Why of the campaign
Call for ideas
Type of campaign
Participants selected
Constraints / Idea template
Evaluation panel appointed
Evaluation criteria set
Invitation ready
Reminder ready
Follow up ready
TASK NOTES
IDEA CAMPAIGN CHECKLIST FOR:
CAMPAIGN MANAGER:
CAMPAIGN OWNER:
Linking online and offline sales
Steven Tyler
Susanna Mulligan
OPENS: CLOSES:
CHECK
Avoid that online and offline sales cannibalize one another
17. May 17. July
What practices would you like to link online and offline sales?
Online sales team and in store sales teams
Ideas must not cannibalize current setup
Yes, Jules Roberts, Andre Peters and Lasse Larsen
Yes, feasibility now 1-5, easy to communicate 1-5
Yes, Susanna has prepared the invitation
Yes, Susanna has prepared this, will add top 3 ideas - 17 June
Will be sent out on 18 July, with video to be made after campaign
New ideas / Best Practices
‡
‡
‡
‡
‡
‡
‡
‡
‡

40 41
We’ve seen idea campaigns range from four people
in a quick brainstorm for problem-solving to 30,000
participants in a company-wide campaign for getting
input at a strategic level.
Groups of participants are assigned, based on
anything from personal interest, to expert groups,
departments, task groups, project teams, business
units or even up to the whole company
for that matter.
Once you’ve established your campaign’s why and the
call for ideas, your ideal group of participants
will often follow naturally. However, one common
pattern is that idea campaigners either choose
either the big bang or the soft launch approach,
when starting out with idea campaigns.
The choice of which one depends on the structure
and, most of all, on the culture of the organisation.
WHO’S INVITED?
Idea campaigns can be open for just a couple of
hours of brainstorming, to basically remaining
always open for ideas.
The length of a campaign is often related to the
number of participants.
Small groups usually mean fast campaigns, while
company-wide campaigns tend to be longer, and may
be divided into different phases, where a panel of
evaluators, perhaps in combination with the popular
vote among participants, decide what ideas will move
on from one phase to the next.
Generally, idea campaigns will last 3–5 weeks,
giving the participants ample time to join in while
keeping the campaign relevant and fresh for the
duration of the campaign.
TIMING

42 43
When the ideas are collected in the system, you can
designate a panel of evaluators and have them rate
the ideas based on a set of evaluation criteria.
Idea selection is a deep subject in itself, but it
doesn’t have to be super complicated. In fact, the
clearer we are in defining our why and our call for
ideas, the more straightforward idea evaluation and
selection becomes.
With regards to communication, there are three
pivotal moments in the idea campaign:
before, during and after.
So make sure you plan what to send out, and when to
send it out. For best practice, we’ve included some
tips on the most effective invitations, reminders
and follow-up messages we’ve come across in all the
idea campaigns that we’ve worked on.
We’ve included them as downloads in our Resource
Center on nos.co/fieldguide, so you can copy, paste,
edit and send out as you require.
EVALUATION
PLAN YOUR COMMUNICATION
So far, so good! You’ve so far covered the
fundamentals of designing an idea campaign.
At Nosco, we just love The Checklist Manifesto
and all the fascinating stories in that book.
Inspired by this, we’ve prepared an idea
campaign checklist for you.
Get the full checklist by navigating to
nos.co/fieldkit and downloading it from our
Resource Center. Also, please remember to fill
it out every time you design and launch
a new idea campaign.
IDEA CAMPAIGN CHECKLIST

44 45
This is where the battle takes place.
2
THE CAMPAIGN
PLATFORM

46 47
Innovation historians pinpoint 1880 as the birth
of the suggestion box. Shipbuilder William Denny &
Brothers set up a wooden suggestion-box on the wall
in the production area, urging employees to come up
with ways to build cheaper and better ships.
Fast forward to today, ideas are no longer confined
to a box on the wall. People are connected via a
multitude of networks and devices, and ideas can
now flow freely in these channels, given the
right conditions.
That’s where your campaign platform comes in, and
it can drive engagement and the quality of ideas to
a level no one would have imagined in 1880, 1980 or
even in 2010 for that matter. Even better, it can
become a self-sustaining process once the campaign
has been launched, if we allow for the right
interactions to happen between participants in the
idea campaign. This chapter is about how to
achieve this.
GIVE IDEAS CONDITIONS TO
GROW AND THRIVE
Idea generation and work with ideas should not be
just confined to annual innovation events, but it
often is.
A must-read book on innovation and culture is
“Innovation as Usual”. In it, the authors have
coined a term for this focus on annual events:
Innovation Island.
Everybody needs to get off that island.
Work with ideas should happen every day. It should
fit seamlessly into the everyday life of your
organisation. Even on a grey, busy Wednesday. In
fact, it could even brighten those days.
The point of this chapter is to make you aware of
the tools you have at your disposal to give your
idea campaign and the ideas the very best conditions
to succeed.
IDEA GENERATION ON A
GREY, BUSY WEDNESDAY
Is it Wednesday today?
Yes No

48 49
Once people have read your inspiring call for ideas,
their imaginations will start working on solutions
and tweaks that can provide value to your campaign.
However, ideas do not always pop up at the exact
moment people read, see or hear your call for ideas.
Therefore, an idea campaign greatly benefits from
being available, even when that great “Aha!” moment
comes to people in the park, in the shower or on
the way to work.
That’s why it’s important to provide participants
with an idea campaign platform that’s available on
computers, tablets and of course mobile.
ALWAYS AVAILABLE,
ALWAYS ON

‘To give a great idea
wings, […], is at
least as valuable as
to hatch it.’ - MARIA POPOVA
BLOGGER, BRAINPICKINGS.ORG

52
There are a few simple, but important tools at your
disposal to drive engagement in the campaign: votes,
comments, and collaboration.
When you pick a platform for your campaign, whether
it’s Nosco or not, we recommend you to look for the
following characteristics.
Social:
Create a connection to the crowd, as well as
interaction between users.
Easy to use:
An idea campaign platform should be designed to be
intuitive to use and easy to understand. It shouldn’t
have to come with an instruction manual. Common sense,
right? But there’s more to it than that.
A well designed idea platform also has to be
delightful to look at and a pleasure to use. That way,
the platform plays an active part in building more
engagement in the idea campaign.
Accessible:
Online, everywhere, all the time, on
mobiles, tablets and laptops.
Manageable:
In your role as the idea campaign
manager, you need tools to ensure that the idea
campaigners don’t spend the majority of their
time buried in excel sheets and email lists.
GIVE IDEAS WINGS

54 55
This is about your actions, both online
and offline as the campaign manager.
It’s about the communication that takes
place before, during and after
the campaign.
3
CAMPAIGN
OUTREACH

57
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
OF AMAZING IDEA
CAMPAIGNS!
Building buy-in for your campaign means getting the
attention and gaining the acceptance of your
employees for spending time on your campaign.
Some of the most successful campaigns we’ve seen have
had the backing of senior management.
It’s important that you promote the senior buy-in.
One way of showing you have this support is by
having member of the senior management send out a
message, record a video or even to stand up in front
of the crowd and say a few words about innovation and
the call for ideas in this campaign.
BUILD BUY-IN
1

58 59
Once you’ve ensured buy-in, it’s time to focus on
log-in. According to a study of more than 200 million
emails, conducted by the good people at MailChimp,
having a subject line shorter than 50 characters and
keeping the message to a maximum of three short
paragraphs will increase the open rate and
click-through rate of your invitations.
Your invites should be written to make use of this
fact. Send participants a simple email, with a clear
clickable link that takes them directly to the idea
campaign.

RESOURCE: Get your free pack of short, sweet email
templates at- www.nos.co/fieldkit
SEND THE PERFECT INVITATION
2
Buy-in? Check. Log-in? Check. Now for weigh-in.
When starting out with your first campaign, a great
way of building traction is to assign a moderator/
community manager.
This person will follow up on ideas via comments
and involve other participants in dialogue about the
ideas. Aside from building involvement, the
moderator also ensures that the initial space is not
an empty void.
MODERATE - GET THE
CONVERSATION STARTED
3

60 61
We cannot expect everyone to buy-in, log-in and
weigh-in from day one. Sending out relevant
and informative reminders is a simple and effective
way of getting non-engaged users involved in your
campaign. This is the low-hanging fruit of running
your campaign.
Time and time again, we see how a simple reminder with
the right content can make engagement soar. Remember,
this is targeted at people who initially maybe did not
deem the idea campaign interesting enough to
participate in, so it’s not enough to write:
‘Hey, why didn’t you log-in? You should really
participate in this campaign’.
Instead, here’s what you should do:
Show ideas from the campaign:
Show 1–3 selected ideas – maybe the ones with the most
votes, or the ones that have generated the most
conversation, or simply ideas that you as the
campaign manager find the most relevant and engaging.
THE REMINDER –
GETTING EVERYONE ON BOARD
4
ADD PERSONALITY
Make the reminder social:
Name the people behind the ideas to make the reminder
more social and to show that there is already
activity going on in the campaign, from people
they know and trust.
Make clickable links in the reminder:
To lower log-in barriers even more, make each link to
examples of ideas clickable, so that they are taken
directly to the campaign.
Make sure that participants add a bit of personality
to their profiles in the platform, since brainstorms
are also social interactions and people like to
engage with like-minded people. Time after time, we’ve
seen how idea campaigns lead to unexpected
connections being made across departments
in companies.
Getting users to fill out their profiles with a
bit about themselves and their interests both in
and outside of work is a great catalyst for these
connections - but how to achieve this?
One way could be, when launching the platform,
create an idea campaign for “Best Profiles”.
5

62 63
Engagement is built over time. So communication
after the campaign is just as vital as before and
during.
Communicating the results and actions taken on an
idea campaign not only shows the participants that
you are thankful for their effort, it also serves
to show sceptics (and there are always sceptics!)
that your idea campaign mattered.
Just like the next one will.
Use the platform’s statistics module to quantify and
present activity and engagement. And talk to people.
Talk to campaign owners and participants to get and
give qualitative feedback on the contents and
implications of the campaign.
RESOURCE: We’ve shared our favorite follow-up
messages for you to cut, copy and paste in our
resource center at nos.co/fieldkit
COMMUNICATE RESULTS
6
It is said, a picture paints a 1,000 words.
A video on Youtube is typically 30 pictures per
second. So a video basically allows you to say
1,8 million words in sixty seconds.
In practice, simple selfie-videos have proven
effective, and can add a bit personality too.
But it doesn’t have to be home-made videos.
Use sites like YouTube and Vimeo to find that clip
from a movie or that Ricky Gervais sketch that
says it all, and embed it into your idea.
VIDEO IS THE NEW BLACK
7

64 65
We’ve know this phenomenon from school dances. The
first dancers to take the floor need to be immensely
brave, whereas joining in when everyone is dancing
is a lot easier.
Time and time again, we seen the positive results of
having a few, relatively qualified ideas ready in the
system. It gives users something to bounce off and
makes initial participation a lot easier.
8
NEVER HAVE AN EMPTY
DANCEFLOOR
Adding pictures to idea campaigns can make them easy
to distinguish and enticing to join in.
Today there are excellent services like unsplash.com
and splitshire.com where you can download free
pictures for your campaigns and other projects.
We’ve selected 25 visuals that fit with the most
common idea campaign themes, get them at
nos.co/fieldkit.
ADD AMAZING PICTURES
Make sure that people also meet the campaign when
they’re not sitting in front of a screen. Hanging up
posters in the office is a simple and effective meth-
od of spreading awareness.
RESOURCE: Download a poster you can edit with your
call for ideas and email or print for the office on
nos.co/fieldkit
POSTERS, YES, POSTERS
9
10

EMPLOYEE
DRIVEN
INNOVATION
NIRVANA

68
We started out by presenting the Fogg Behavior Model
to provide context for the effect of our three
elements in idea campaigns.
EPILOGUE
ALIGNING THE THREE
ELEMENTS
The outreach (the triggers and fit into everyday
life in the organisation).
The call for ideas (motivation/reason).1.
2.
3. The platform (accessibility and ease of use).
The top-right corner in the figure below is where you
reach employee driven innovation nirvana, but don’t
be disappointed if you do not reach that level on the
first, second or even tenth try.
Every organisation has its own particular culture and
set of business problems that probably get in the way
of attaining perfect employee-driven innovation.
Nirvana is just something to aim for.

70
AFTER THE CAMPAIGN –
NOW WHAT?
When your campaign is over, you’ll hopefully be left
with a bunch of great ideas, that it is time to
now act on.
Taking action on ideas is a big subject, and how to
do this varies greatly from company to company and
campaign to campaign.
As you might have guessed, we also have a great amount
of notes and best practices on idea selection.
But that’s a whole different book, not just a
different chapter.
In the future. we’d love to sit down and write our
Field Guide to Idea Selection.

THANK YOU
We sincerely hope you enjoyed this
guide, and that you will go on to
create amazing campaigns.
Remember to check out the Field Guide
resource center at nos.co/fieldkit
- The Nosco Team

Nosco field-guide

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