How do you engage customers and employees for new ideas? Doug Collins talks crowdsourcing.

Doug Collins serves as an innovation architect. He helps organizations such as The Estee Lauder Companies, Intel Corporation, Johnson & Johnson, The Procter & Gamble Company, and Reed Elsevier navigate the fuzzy front end of innovation. Doug develops approaches, creates forums, and structures engagements whereby people can convene to explore the critical questions facing the enterprise. He helps people assign economic value to the ideas and to the collaboration that result. As an author, Doug explores ways in which people can apply the practice of collaborative innovation in his series Innovation Architecture: A New Blueprint for Engaging People through Collaborative Innovation. His bi-weekly column appears in the publication Innovation Management. Doug serves on the board of advisors for Frost & Sullivan’s Global community of Growth, Innovation and Leadership (GIL). Doug’s latest book, a business narrative on how one company navigates the Digital Age by applying collaborative innovation, was published in the fall of 2014. Doug works as senior practice leader and Vice President, Innovation Architecture, at social innovation company Spigit, part of Mindjet, Inc. He focuses on helping clients realize their potential for leadership by pursuing and perfecting their practice of collaborative innovation.