Leveraging the wisdom of crowds: Designing an IT-supported ideas competition for an ERP software company

"Crowdsourcing" is currently one of the most discussed key words within the open innovation community. The major question for both research and business is how to find and lever the enormous potential of the "collective brain". This research in progress paper provides an approach for finding and leveraging innovations for an ERP Software company among its user base. This is done by designing an IT-supported ideas competition within the SAP UCC (University Competence Center) User Group to use the potentials of the collective intelligence of this crowd. The German SAP UCC User Group consists of about 60,000 people (lecturers and students) using SAP Software for educational purposes. The practical problem is twofold: On the one hand, there is not much activity yet in this community. On the other hand, SAP has not tried to systematically address this highly educated group for idea generation or innovation development so far. Therefore, the objective of this research is to generate innovations, process and product ideas for SAP Research and Development through an IT-supported ideas competition among the SAP UCC Community. Furthermore, the concept aims at providing an interface to SAP Human Resources processes in order to identify the most promising students in this VC. This paper follows an Action Research Approach. It is focusing on the diagnosing and action planning phase to develop an integrated concept of the ideas competition within the VC.