Crowdsourcing problem-solving
WITH ITS INNOVATIVE CROWDSPARX PROGRAM, ALEX LEE CASTS A WIDE NET FOR GAME-CHANGING IDEAS
During the past decade, Alex Lee— parent company of Merchants Distributors, Lowes Foods, W. Lee Flowers, and Souto Foods—has fostered innovation through Sparx, a series of initiatives that engage employees in challenges to solve customer pain points. “We recognize that everybody has a unique lens on innovation and a perspective they want to contribute,” says Robert Vipperman, Alex Lee’s chief people officer and chief strategy officer. The company has developed several inventive ways to solve problems by tapping into its employees’ ingenuity, earning it a spot on Fast Company ’s list of Best Workplaces for Innovators. Vipperman explains how Alex Lee’s programming ignites innovation and helps employees and the company grow.
1 How do you cultivate innovation across your organization?
We take a multifaceted approach, involving as many people inside and outside our organization as possible. For example, our Sparkathon program presents challenges to our entire organization of 14,500 employees who compete to generate solutions to a specific question. We then use an internal platform to collect ideas, keeping them visible to other participants so everyone can iterate off of each other’s ideas. The latest challenge centered around promoting sustainability and reducing environmental impact, and the winning idea was a reusable bag rental program. The winner received one year of free groceries. We also recently started a crowdsourcing program we call Crowdsparx —powered by our partners at Mindsumo—for global challenges that tap individuals outside our organization. We kicked off the program with two challenges and expect as many as 150 proposals for each. The creativity we’ve seen has been a shot in the arm, giving us insight into what people from very different cultures and backgrounds think. It’s illuminating to get a 360 view of what innovation can be when everybody plays.
2 How do your innovation programs help your employees grow?
Programs like this help create individual entrepreneurs, people who can innovate and create new things within the company. Take our Spark Tank program: It puts employees in our enterprise leadership program in small teams that propose a new idea or line of business and present it to an executive-team panel of judges for real-time feedback. Teams have a chance to build new connections with each other and address customer needs while coming up with creative, feasible, and profitable solutions. Meanwhile, they’re developing subskills throughout that process, including putting ideas together, creating a business case, and pitching to senior executives in an engaging way.
3 What kind of material impact do these programs have on customers—and the business at large?
Our innovation programs have resulted in tangible benefits for the company. One program, Spot, helps customers track deliveries so they know exactly what is being delivered and when. Another, Happy Truck, makes deliveries by truck more efficient by coordinating backhaul—the loads our delivery trucks take on their return trip, which aren’t necessarily food items. It’s been profitable for us to the tune of millions of dollars. There are intangible benefits, as well. Innovation programs that involve the whole organization give our people the desire to assert their ideas and speak truth to power. It makes people feel safer to create and take risks. And it makes them feel like they’ve got greater ownership in where they and the company are going in the future.