Kickbox Open Sourcing Makes Innovation Easily Accessible for All Companies

Unleash innovation throughout your company with the newly open-sourced Adobe Kickbox.

What would happen if you funded every idea your employees come up with sight unseen? We decided to find out.

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At Adobe, we believe anyone can be an innovator and you never know when—or where—creativity will strike. So, in late 2012, we developed a new approach that supports innovation by just saying “yes.” We call it Kickbox and it aligns passion with purpose by arming potential innovators with the tools they need to make their ideas a reality. Among the Kickbox starter kit materials that guides participants from idea inception and beyond is a $1,000 pre-paid credit card to fund experiments free of expense reports and approval. Kickbox is one of several programs at Adobe to incubate ideas and cultivate future innovations, explorations and projects inside our product teams, labs, research teams and more.

Today, we are excited to share the success of Kickbox by open sourcing this unique program. The idea to share Kickbox came from other companies that heard what we were doing and contacted
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us asking for more information. Starting today, any company can download and use Adobe’s Kickbox innovation process to help ignite their own employee innovators.

Kickbox makes innovation in large organizations actionable by putting everything innovators need in a mysterious red box. There are six color-coded levels in the Kickbox process each with step-by-step instructions_._ These levels walk new innovators through having an idea, expressing that idea, testing it with potential users and building organizational support. Here is one of my favorite quotes from a recent Kickbox participant:

“Kickbox can turn innovation from something uncertain and scary into something you know how to do. Now, when I have a new idea I can use the process and test it out. It’s like power tools for innovators.”
-Kush Amerasinghe, Computer Scientist, Adobe

So far, over 1,000 people have used Kickbox to explore ideas. They really seem to love it, and it has a big impact on them. They’re no longer just performing assigned tasks. They’re now innovators who are able to align their personal passion for invention with the company’s purpose of solving hard problems for our customers. Whether they’re applying their new skills to existing projects or creating new projects, the program aims to awaken a sense of personal initiative to imagine, to dream, and to create. It’s already catching steam with educators who are embracing Kickbox as a case study for their business school classrooms and corporations looking to inspire and incubate innovation with employees alike:

“Between my consulting, teaching and writing, I’ve worked with around three dozen companies on their innovation programs, but this is the most open, yet comprehensive mobilization of employee innovation talent I’ve ever come across.”
– Jeremy Dann, Adjunct Professor, USC Marshall School of Business

Kickbox is a tightly formulated program that will coax innovation and genuine excitement out of any company’s most valuable resource – its employees. We invite you to experiment with Kickbox today and unleash your employees’ passion for innovation.

Follow Mark on Twitter @markran