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.
I created NorthStar, a crowdsourced employee ideation platform, to test a different approach. Starting with a small pilot, I designed a way for employees to share ideas across organizational boundaries, contribute their own experience to ideas from others, and help promising opportunities become stronger through the collective knowledge of the organization.
The Innovation Challenge
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, what had been discussed, 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 in the organization, while 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.
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.
What I Saw
The organization already had much of the knowledge needed to strengthen new ideas. The problem was that there was no easy way to know who had it.
Someone outside a team might know an idea had been explored before, understand why a similar approach hadn't worked, have experience with the customer or operational problem behind it, or know about another effort already underway. But traditional organizational structures made those connections largely dependent on who happened to know whom.
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.
What I Changed
I created NorthStar as a crowdsourced ideation experience designed to make organizational knowledge more visible and useful. Rather than creating another place for employees to simply submit ideas, I wanted to test whether opening ideas to a broader community could help surface relevant experience, challenge assumptions, and make connections that organizational silos often prevented.
I started small, piloting the concept within Loyalty before expanding it as we learned what encouraged people to participate and where the model could create value.
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 Enterprise Adoption
01
PROVE IT
02
FIND A WAY FORWARD
03
BUILD THE MOMENTUM
04
EARN THE OPPORTUNITY
30 Employees | 2 Weeks
I launched NorthStar with a small Loyalty pilot to test whether employees would engage with a crowdsourced approach to sharing and developing ideas. Participation quickly extended beyond the original group, reaching employees across 19 departments.
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.
~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.
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 opportunity to test the expanded community model in one of the airline's most operationally complex environments.
GOOD IDEAS TRAVEL
A 30-PERSON PILOT REACHED EMPLOYEES ACROSS 19 DEPARTMENTS.
The early response showed that employees outside the originating team had experiences and perspectives they could contribute to the conversation.
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
Knowledge Could Travel
Experience didn't have to stay within one team.
Employees could bring lessons, historical context, and expertise into conversations outside their day-to-day roles, helping valuable organizational knowledge remain useful even as people moved between teams and departments.
Ideas Could Be Vetted by Experience
More perspectives could strengthen an idea before it moved forward.
Employees could question assumptions, share what had been tried before, identify considerations others might not know about, and build on one another's thinking rather than evaluating ideas within a single organizational silo.
02
03
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.
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.
04
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. I recruited employees who believed in the concept, worked within the technology we had available, and continued developing the experience until we could demonstrate what a broader community model might look like.
Eventually, the opportunity came from somewhere we hadn't planned for: leaders in the Integrated Operations Center saw what we were building and asked to bring it into one of the airline's most complex operational environments.
Innovation doesn't always move forward because someone approves the roadmap. Sometimes you have to prove the value, build the momentum, and give the organization a reason to make room for it.