Participative Innovation at France Job Center, with Reynald Chapuis

Reynald Chapuis is Innovation and CSR manager at France Job Center (Pôle Emploi). He recently prefaced a book by Olivier Pujol and Stéphane Bernard on ‘Innovation’s delight: find out an idea, and implement it’. He kindly shares with us the multiple innovation initiatives going on at France Job Center.

Innovation and CSR divivision was set-up in 2012, with a mission to:

define innovation for France job Center, including everything that brings a better user experience, prospective on what are a public service and center in 2030, and value creation strategies for a 3 to 4 years layout;
define CSR policy, covering everything that brings engagement, awareness, and responsibility.

Participative Innovation

Employees involvement in innovation goes through a comprehensive process to unfold creative and responsible services:

Idea: Any employee can pitch his creative idea, and send it in a video;
Innovation Experts’ Feedback: Selected video (20%) gives rise to an exchange with the idea owner, and decide the next step: 1) stop 2) share the video on E-novaction platform;
Community Feedback: Sharing the idea on E-Novaction platform means the idea is refined, and exposed for 60 days to the community: it can then collect feedbacks, and supports or ‘likes’ (supports will be next handled as a capital, in a gamification purpose, with a limited number of likes that one can attribute, and which bring reward if the idea wins).;
Demonstrator Project: If the idea is popular, it is granted a proof of concept (‘demonstrator’), and the innovation team will coach the idea owner, agregate complementary ideas, and connect him with experts that will help to build a project;
Experimentation: Every French region can pick-up the demonstrator for experimentation (3 to 9 months);
Exposure: Demonstrator can exposed on the E-Novation Forum, a 3 weeks event once a year;
Deployment: 2 necessary conditions must be fulfilled, a steering committee, and the results of the experimentation (achievements, learnings, target, and impacts). Here the ability to engage industrial process, C-level management, BtoB business unit are assessed.

In one year, 10,000 ideas have been shared on E-Novaction platform, 70% of the empoyees have browsed on the web site.

2/3 of the ideas come out of thematic challenges, at local, regional or national level, which can help to detect intrapreneurs, and unearth pains in the organization, and the user experience: for example, how to make job opportunities appear, with a model which detects companies that are going to recruit (labonneboîte).

E-Novation will be soon opened to Job partners, like a territorial collectivity, and their servants.

Innovation Lab in Paris

An Innovation Lab has opened doors in Paris, 19^ème district, over 600 m2. It aims at:

designing creative services involving users and public servants, partners and startups (4 weeks preparation, and 3 days workshop); one typical example was ‘moving fromm school to work, how can Job Center help?’;
incubating, and accelerating projects over 8 to 10 weeks;
supporting experimentations.

Innovation app store

Emploi-store-idées.fr is a collaborative platform invoving users and coders to turn ideas into mobile apps, and web sites. Scope is on employment and job mobility. Empoyment data and APIs are displayed on developers’ portal Emploi-store-dev.fr, and relationship between users and developers is facilitated. Over 100 apps/web services have been completed, and are exposed on Emploi-store.fr.

Challenges based on employement data and hackathons help to detect innovative solutions. For example a recent challenge, ChallengePE Big Data, was organized to reinvent the way to apply for a job.

Crowdfunding platform Ulule provides training to selected projects owners to help them shape their crowdfunding campaign: 2 winners from the mobility challenge spent 3 weeks at Ulule.

Challenges lead to 27 files uploaded in 6 months, and presented to a jury. Typical prizes rank from €1500 to €5000. An emblematic laureate is Endsight which exploits unsuccessful job applications, and combines a digital solution with guidelines book for self-diganostic.

An open innovation cluster, HR-Lab

Job Center innovation team is committed to a cluster dedicated to HR and digital, HR-Lab, with BPI partner (a HR consulting boutique), and startups engaged on HR, management and personal development. It aims at promoting innovation and digital to facilitate employment, support compani’es growth, and improve happiness at work. The Lab works at federating startups to build common offering, and propose simple unified solutions to job seeker.