Aristocrat Changes the Game by Giving Every Employee the Opportunity to Solve Challenges

Gaming industry revenue is 10 times greater than box office revenue, creating incredible opportunities for companies like Aristocrat, a leading global game developer that lives and breathes innovation. As a rapid growth organization, which has tripled in size over just the past five years as it ascended into its current market leader position, Aristocrat was interested in developing a platform to bring its deep and diverse talent pool together to identify, ideate, and prototype solutions for challenges and opportunities that could have the most impact for its many stakeholders.

Aristocrat developed its “thinkBIGGER” innovation accelerator, supported by the Planview IdeaPlace™ innovation management solution, an intuitive technology platform that enables companies to inspire and manage innovation across the enterprise. With an interactive hub to collect and vet ideas, employees from every level and every corner of the globe have the opportunity to participate in solving challenges, pose fresh ideas, and be discovered as the next company rock star.

Aristocrat Leisure Limited is a leading global provider of gaming solutions. Listed on the Australian Security Exchange (ASX: ALL), Aristocrat is licensed by more than 200 regulators, and its products and services are available in more than 90 countries around the world. The company offers a diverse range of products and services, including electronic gaming, casino management systems, and online social gaming.

Aristocrat has a large and diverse customer base, including casinos on and off tribal reservations, other gaming venues, and online gamers, each looking for the next greatest gaming innovation. With the recognition that innovation is its lifeblood, Aristocrat needed a better way to challenge all employees to become part of the solution by identifying opportunities to meet the different needs of its clients, solving challenges, and anticipating future gaming trends. They wanted employees to think outside of the box and be emboldened to voice their ideas no matter their role, location, or paygrade.

Believing its own employees best have the capacity to shape the future of the company and the industry, the thinkBIGGER initiative aims at empowering Aristocrat’s diverse global talent. The company chose IdeaPlace to support its innovation efforts, enabling it to not only engage employees and gather ideas but to provide transparency in the status of each idea so people know their ideas are heard.

“No one has the perfect idea,” says Roberto Coppola, Vice President of Corporate Innovation at Aristocrat. “Spigit allows us to make innovation a collaborative process where people from any area of the business can look at an idea and offer new perspectives and “what ifs,”, ways to improve it, or other considerations that help sculpt it until it’s either ready for prototyping or vetted out. Our innovation process is now transparent, collaborative, and continual. We have shifted our mindset from periodic problem-solving to perpetual opportunities for discovery where every employee has the chance to come up with the next great idea at any time. We don’t just tell people we want to hear their ideas; we give them a platform to voice them.”

Some of the challenges posed in IdeaPlace are technologyfocused, while others are solving cultural challenges, like how to become more sustainable, diverse, and inclusive. Aristocrat also has the capability to pose challenges in different languages to reach their employees in locations such as Eastern Europe and Latin America. The software provides measurement as well, giving the company data they can use to further promote thinkBIGGER among employees and executives across the world.

By tapping into the collective knowledge and creativity of its nearly 7,000 people worldwide, Aristocrat has yielded thousands of ideas from five challenges in the first three months that have turned into various prototypes that they continue to develop. “We’ve given our people a voice and that has been a powerful motivator,” says Coppola. “Real innovation can come from anywhere, usually from people who aren’t afraid to challenge the norm but may not have felt like their voice mattered. We’ve changed that. IdeaPlace allows us to quickly identify the best ideas so we’re focusing on the right things that not only solve current and emerging challenges, but also those ideas that have the opportunity to revolutionize the gaming industry.”

With a structured innovation platform in place, anyone can become a rock star at Aristocrat – and they now know it, thanks to a highly impactful internal marketing campaign that reaches even the most remote employee. With transparency into the innovation process and data-backed evidence of its value, employees are more vested in helping to shape the future direction of the company.

To learn more about what Planview® solutions can do for your organization, visit Planview.com