Ideawake is a company that empowers innovation leaders with tools to transform employees into innovators and their ideas into measurable impact. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Ideawake founder and CEO Coby Skonord to learn more.
Coby Skonord’s Background
Skonord graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater with degrees in Accounting and Finance. Skonord said:
“In college, I worked in sales for a paramedical insurance company, where I increased sales by 30% in three months as a college freshman. After graduation, I landed a job at the Big Four accounting firm Ernst & Young, where I put in my two weeks’ notice on the first day of training to start Ideawake.”
Formation Of Ideawake
How did the idea for Ideawake come together? Skonord shared:
“The original idea came up for Ideawake in my parents’ basement during winter break my Junior year in college. I was reading up on the trends of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding and was one of the early users on Kickstarter.”
“My original vision was to build an online startup accelerator, empowering anyone in the world who had an idea with the funding, skills, and other resources they’d need to bring it to life all in one place. After doing this for two years, we helped build over 500 products in a variety of different industries from software, to textiles, to hardware.”
“The issue we ran into was that the business model wasn’t scalable without a significant amount of funding which we didn’t feel the Midwest market could support. So, we pivoted our focus to targeting a similar product to the B2B space that enabled employers to capture, evaluate, and implement ideas from employees in a fun and engaging way, and landed our first big customer Aurora Healthcare in 2017.”
Favorite Memory
What has been Skonord’s favorite memory working for Ideawake so far? Skonord reflected
“By far the most fulfilling memory was the first time a front-line team member reached out to me via email thanking us for building Ideawake and how much it improved their work experience since they felt like they were empowered with a voice and had already had 3 of their ideas implemented and received recognition from their manager and team members.”
“It’s great to help businesses save money and identify new ways to grow by tapping into the collective intelligence of their workforce, but being able to feel the human impact Ideawake has from the team members actually engaging with the system has made the work even more rewarding.”
Challenges Faced
What are some of the challenges Skonord faced in building the company? Skonord acknowledged:
“We’re in over 14 different verticals, but since we focused a lot of our efforts on Healthcare before COVID, we ran into challenges achieving our growth targets when COVID hit since their focus went into delivering critical care and not implementing new projects/systems like Ideawake. Although we still have a strong focus on the Healthcare space, we have shifted our strategy to increase our customer mix in other verticals like Insurance, Manufacturing, and Financial Services.”
Core Products
What are Ideawake’s core products and features? Skonord explained:
“Ideawake’s software taps the collective wisdom of employees, customers, and vendors to discover the 5% of ideas that will drive 95% of new business results. Here’s how it works: 1.) Companies launch challenges related to cost reduction, revenue growth, and employee engagement; 2.) Employees post ideas under challenge topics in exchange for points and peer recognition; 3.) Employees vote on the best ideas and recommend revisions; 4. The best ideas are reviewed for feasibility and assigned to cross-functional teams for implementation.”
Evolution Of Ideawake’s Technology
How has Ideawake’s technology evolved since launching? Skonord noted:
“We’ve rewritten the platform twice since its initial launch in order to make a solution that’s easier for companies to use at scale.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of Ideawake’s most significant milestones? Skonord highlighted:
— Getting accepted into gener8tor, a premiere startup accelerator with an acceptance rate that’s lower than Harvard
— Landing the first notable customers like HP, SiriusXM, Epson, and Prosegur
— Reaching over 250,000 users
— Raising their first million dollars in funding
Customer Success Stories
When I asked Skonord about customer success stories, he emphasized the following:
– We helped ExamOne identify $1,400,000 in savings in the first 6 months of implementation from 33 ideas related to quick wins like error rate reduction and eliminating redundant processes.
– We helped InSinkerator, a division of Emerson identify over $800,000 in the first year of implementing Ideawake from ideas to increase efficiency and reduce scrap.
– We helped a global food production company identify $225 million in new revenue opportunities in one quarter and add $25 million into the new product development pipeline during that same timeframe.
– We helped Vizient increase employee engagement scores by 10% in the first 12 months after implementation.
– We helped Palisades Tahoe increase employee learning and engagement scores by 74% in the first 6-months of implementation.
Case Studies
– ExamOne Case Study – Reducing operational expenses by over 2% in 6 months.
– Aurora Health Case Study – Enabling a culture of innovation in the Health Care industry.
– SVAM Case Study – Increasing employee learning and engagement by 74% in 6 months
according to Mckinsey’s Organizational Health Index.
– Sanford Quality Improvement Goes Virtual – Digitizing quarterly continuous improvement initiatives to streamline scoring across a geographical area the size of Texas.
– Sanford COVID Innovation – Addressing safety concerns arising from COVID and ideating on ways to make patients feel comfortable re-engaging with in-person visits.
– Sanford Behavioral Health Challenge – Challenge focused on ideation on processes and communication to improve suicide prevention.
– ProHealth Care Case Study – Engaging employees to transform patient experience and better attract millennials.
Funding
When I asked Skonord about funding, he revealed:
“We’ve raised over $3,100,00 to date and are powering innovation programs in over 39 countries and 185 cities. Don’t want to mention revenue metrics yet.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is Ideawake pursuing? Skonord assessed:
“Ideawake targets the 64,183 companies between 250 – 5,000 employees with an easy to use, highly engaging idea management platform. This results in a total addressable market of over $5.28 billion.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Ideawake from its competition? Skonord replied:
— We have the newest platform on the market, rewritten from the ground up in 2020 with the latest technology
— We’re the easiest to use platform on the market
— Instead of just focusing on providing you with a tool to collect and manage ideas, we integrate a lot of the change management and coaching you need to drastically improve the impact of these programs
Business Advice
What advice would you give to other entrepreneurs? Skonord responded:
“The importance of integrating innovation metrics into your employees quarterly and annual goals at all levels of the organization.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of Ideawake’s future company goals? Skonord concluded:
— Reaching $10,000,000 in annual revenue
— Expanding to 50 employees
— Further integration of AI into our solution to help employees come up with more unique disruptive ideas and to teach them how to build the business case behind their ideas
— Integration of our secondary product called the Ideabox program which enables intrapreneurs with no prior business experience the ability to validate, develop, and pilot their own ideas
