Our stories
Accelerating innovation at a time of crisis
As the COVID-19 crisis began to unfold, PwC’s board and management teams were inundated with ideas from our people on what we could do as a firm to help society navigate the pandemic. We wanted to harness this energy, using it as an opportunity to bring people together to solve one of the most important problems we’d ever faced.
Setting the scene
The IdeaSpace platform encouraged our people to develop and share innovative solutions to the problems brought about by COVID-19.
With our purpose - to build trust in society and solve important problems - firmly in mind, we challenged our people to respond to one big question: “How can we live the PwC purpose at a time of disruption to better serve our people, firm, clients and communities?”
How we helped
In just five days, we designed a new innovation space, hosted on our firmwide innovation platform, which offered:
a structured application process based on a problem-centric approach to ideation, resulting in higher-quality submissions.
engagement tools to support voting and commenting on ideas.
a review tool that enabled us to select ideas in a structured way, using a panel of judges from across the firm to evaluate the potential impact and feasibility of the idea.
“When lockdown began, we heard that our people wanted to do more for our clients and society, to support them through the immediate COVID-19 crisis. So we rapidly created and launched an ideation platform to help our people to share their ideas and then collaborate, bringing them together to focus on solving an important problem - “How can we live the PwC purpose at a time of disruption to better serve our people, firm, clients and communities?” As we expected our people rose to the challenge and generated a large number of practical and innovative suggestions that we have been able to take forward and implement to help our clients, our people and the communities in which we live and work."
Making a difference
Over a three-week period, the IdeaSpace platform saw huge levels of engagement from our people; 4,000 views and nearly 100 ideas were submitted from across the firm.
From the ideas submitted, we were then able to identify quick wins, raise awareness of ideas that were already in motion, and shortlist ideas we wanted to develop further.
Our team has been developing the best of the ideas, with a focus on enabling us and our clients to adapt quickly to the impacts of COVID-19.
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