Co-Creation with FCR

Imagine having 1,200 brilliant minds scattered across 35 offices, yet struggling to capture a single thread of their collective creativity. That was FCR Media's dilemma—a flood of ideas lost in emails and spreadsheets. But what happens when innovation finally finds a home? In this story, the Belgium office bets on a deceptively simple idea-capturing tool, and what unfolds is not just a shift in process, but a rethinking of how innovation itself takes root.

“I found that Ideanote was much simpler to work with, much simpler to figure out.”

– Bart van der Heijden, Director Strategy & Innovation

Since 2010, FCR Media has expanded their media-based services to 12 countries through acquisitions. At the moment, they have more than 1200 employees spread out over 35 offices – so it’s safe to call FCR Media an international giant.

Choosing Ideanote

The FCR Media Belgium office revisited the way they were collecting ideas, and they found that sharing them via e-mail and gathering them in a spreadsheet was not sufficient.

When asked what they did with ideas before Ideanote, the answer was: “We tried different ways of working but nothing helped us in a structural way.”

This underutilization of their employees’ creativity lead them to create an innovation-lab, where a select number of team members could focus on ideas and innovation. To do this, FCR Media needed a tool dedicated to gather, organize and share ideas.

“It was to streamline and to structure the input that came from everywhere in terms of innovation, so we needed to be able to structure and track innovation ideas.”

– Bart van der Heijden, Director Strategy & Innovation

In order to find the best-suited tool, they choose 15 ideas that had been suggested, put them into Ideanote and another platform, and found that the Ideanote platform was far superior, both in terms of simplicity and intuitiveness.

Using Ideanote

When talking about their process of being onboarded to Ideanote, words like intuitive, logical and agile are mentioned. It’s clear that Ideanote is used in FCR Media’s innovation-lab mainly because of its intuitive nature and customizable features. Because Ideanote is an intuitive platform, members can spend less time learning the features, and more time brainstorming.

“Given our strategy to partner and co-create with international innovative players, we are continuously looking for ideas or solutions that are already available in the market and have a proven value.”

The customizable feature of Ideanote is also visible in the way FCR Media has decided to use the platform. By restricting access to 20 members located in the Belgium office, the two administrators are able to give each idea an in-depth review. In a sense, Ideanote is the incubator in which FCR Media’s ideas are allowed to grow and reveal their full potential.

The specific ideas generated focus on how already existing software can help customers. Through the Ideanote platform, FCR Media is building upon already existing software and ideas, as well as exploring the market and where.