Structuring internal innovation on a platform that takes ideas all the way to product

Sogei is the in-house company acting as technology partner to Italy’s Ministry of Economy and Finance. It runs the national tax information system, the tax registry and strategic digital projects for the Italian public administration.

In an organisation of this scale, innovation ideas come from the people who work on the systems every day. Sogei understood this long ago, and had already organised itself accordingly.

Sogei had already defined its own innovation flow: employees could submit their proposals and, if considered promising, an experiment would begin. The actors involved were already clear and positioned along the journey.

The flow worked, but they wanted to improve it and move it onto a dedicated platform. That is why they turned to blendX. Together we started by examining how each step worked, to find out where to intervene and what could be improved: how and when a proposal enters evaluation, who examines it and in what order, what happens between the initial idea and the actual experiment. Without these steps defined, even a good flow risks slowing down exactly where clarity is needed most.

BlendX started from its own innovation management model and adapted it to Sogei’s requirements, which were more complex than a linear journey. Together with the internal team, the entire flow was dissected, mapping every step from the submission of a proposal through to release.

The journey involves several evaluation teams in sequence: the submitted proposal is first examined by the technology team, which gives a preliminary outcome; an internal procedure follows in which a team of architects evaluates the proposal and, if confirmed, the idea becomes a POC; the technology team then defines an experimentation team, with a lead and its members, which takes charge of the POC; during the experiment the team liaises with the technical team to determine whether the POC is valid, needs reworking or should be closed; if the experiment is approved, the POC enters the product catalogue.

From this flow, two integrated solutions were born on the blendX platform: one dedicated to idea management, from submission to evaluation, and one dedicated to managing experiments.

The first version was built on the Odoo framework, for beta-testing with maximum speed and flexibility. Later, we rebuilt the entire setup on ServiceNow technology, as a certified app, with logic and interfaces redesigned for the new technology. The method stayed the same. What changed was the platform hosting it.

• An internal innovation process structured end-to-end, from the employee’s proposal to the new product
• Defined roles and evaluation steps, with the POC leaving the idea owner’s hands and continuing along a structured path
• Two integrated solutions supporting the flow: idea management and experimentation management
• A technology-independent method, which withstood the rebuild on a new enterprise platform while keeping the process logic intact
• A structured, reusable flow, a starting point to adapt for new contexts