Innovation strategy · Employee ideation
What happens when good ideas have nowhere to go?
I saw a gap between the knowledge employees carried and the organization’s ability to connect it. Ideas, lessons learned, and experience often lived within individual teams or with the people who had accumulated them, making valuable knowledge difficult to find and easy to lose as people and organizations changed.
American had no shortage of employees with ideas or experience. The challenge was that much of that knowledge lived within individual teams and with the people who had accumulated it. Frequent reorganizations and employee movement made that especially difficult. When someone changed departments, the history they carried with them, what had been tried, what had failed, and what had already been vetted could effectively move with them. In a highly siloed organization, people working on similar problems might never know that useful knowledge or relevant expertise already existed somewhere else. That also made evaluating new ideas harder: an idea that looked new within one department might have history elsewhere, and employees outside the obvious team could have experience that materially changed how the opportunity should be understood.
The opportunity wasn’t just to capture more ideas. It was to connect ideas with the institutional knowledge, experience, and people needed to make them better.
What I changed
The crowd wasn’t valuable because more people could submit ideas. It was valuable because more of the organization’s knowledge could help shape them.
I saw an opportunity to treat employees not simply as a source of ideas, but as a source of collective intelligence. If people could see and contribute to ideas beyond their own teams, the organization could use its existing knowledge to challenge assumptions, identify connections, surface expertise, and strengthen opportunities before investing further in them. So I created NorthStar as a crowdsourced ideation experience designed to make organizational knowledge more visible and useful. Rather than building another place to simply submit ideas, I wanted to test whether opening ideas to a broader community could surface relevant experience and make connections that organizational silos often prevented.
01 · Make ideas visible
Give ideas and their history somewhere to live.
NorthStar created a shared space where employees could contribute ideas and make them visible beyond the conversations or teams where they originated, helping preserve context that might otherwise disappear as priorities, roles, and organizations changed.
02 · Put the crowd to work
Let relevant knowledge find the idea.
Employees could contribute perspectives, experience, and feedback even when an idea fell outside their day-to-day role, allowing knowledge from across the organization to help challenge, validate, and strengthen what was being proposed.
03 · Connect ideas to opportunity
Help promising ideas become more than submissions.
By making participation and feedback visible, NorthStar gave teams and leaders a way to see where ideas were gaining traction, discover connections across the organization, and identify opportunities worth exploring further.
Iterate · Overcome · Rally · Expand
From pilot to bigger opportunity.
I launched NorthStar with a small Loyalty pilot to test whether employees would engage with a crowdsourced approach to sharing and developing ideas. It was introduced to 30 employees in one department and left open to everyone. Over two weeks, 80 employees from 19 departments engaged, showing that people outside the originating team had experience and perspective they wanted to contribute.
01 · Prove it
30 employees, 2 weeks
A small pilot was enough to show there was real appetite for sharing knowledge across team lines.
02 · Find a way forward
Executive interest, but no obvious owner
I presented the pilot findings to the CIO and her staff. They saw potential in the concept, but NorthStar didn’t fit neatly within an existing team or organizational structure, leaving no clear path for what should happen next.
03 · Build the momentum
~10 employee volunteers
Rather than letting the idea stop there, I continued developing NorthStar and recruited employees who volunteered their time to help. Working within the technology available to us, we expanded the experience to support separate communities, discussion topics, profiles, and administrators without integration into American’s enterprise systems.
04 · Earn the opportunity
The Integrated Operations Center
The work caught the attention of leadership in American’s Integrated Operations Center, the organization responsible for coordinating the airline’s operation. They asked to use NorthStar within their department, giving us the chance to test the expanded community model in one of the airline’s most operationally complex environments.
What changed because of it
NorthStar created more than another place to submit ideas.
It gave employees a way to share knowledge beyond their immediate teams, bring experience from different parts of the airline into the same conversation, and strengthen ideas through perspectives that organizational silos often kept apart. The value wasn’t simply capturing more ideas. It was making more of the knowledge already inside the organization visible and useful.
01 · Expertise became easier to find
What people knew became more visible beyond who they worked with every day.
Profiles, communities, and discussions helped employees see who had relevant experience and connect knowledge to opportunities beyond traditional reporting lines and departmental boundaries.
02 · More employees had a voice
Good ideas weren’t limited by someone’s place on the org chart.
NorthStar created another way for employees to contribute ideas and experience to organizational challenges, including people who might not otherwise have been part of the meeting, team, or department where the conversation was happening.
What this taught me
Sometimes the hardest part of innovation isn’t proving an idea has value. It’s creating enough momentum for the organization to know what to do with it.
NorthStar started as an experiment, but the employee response showed me there was a bigger need underneath it. People had knowledge, history, and ideas that could be valuable well beyond their own teams, yet the structure of the organization made it difficult for that knowledge to travel.
What happened after the pilot taught me just as much. Executive interest didn’t automatically create ownership, funding, or a home for the idea. When there wasn’t an obvious path forward, I kept working the problem until we could demonstrate what a broader community model might look like. And eventually, the opportunity came from somewhere we hadn’t planned for.
Knowledge your organization can’t find?
Let’s help your best ideas find their people.
The knowledge is usually already there. It just needs a way to travel.
Let’s talk →or email sbinger@stephaniebinger.com
Better questions lead to brighter ideas.