Grassroots innovation turns customer success with Bluebolt program

When you constantly encourage others to innovate, you better walk the talk. Our Bluebolt innovation program, launched in April 2023, has turned out a major success: up to date more than 130,000 ideas have been submitted, of which more than 23,000 ideas are implemented and 8,000 related projects are in progress with clients.

How do you foster and facilitate a forward-leaned and innovative company culture, where employees at all levels contribute? At Cognizant, the innovation program Bluebolt was introduced to empower our global associates to devise and submit ideas – large and small – with the goal of advancing clients’ success.

Has the ideation program fulfilled our ambitions? Without doubt; so far it has driven more than $150 million in estimated annualized cost savings across more than 1,100 client implementations. As for industries, most Bluebolt ideas have been implemented in the manufacturing, logistics, energy, utilities and insurance industries, as well as the banking and financial services sectors.

Junior-level employees contribute most

All in all, 220,000 Cognizant associates have been trained on Bluebolt. An important part of the program is so-called “design thinking”, which involves design methodology to understand customer problems.

The process is straight-forward; anyone can log into the platform with their employment number and launch an idea. Ideas with potential qualify for the next level where investment opportunities are explored. Bluebolt ideas span use cases such as applying AI and machine learning algorithms to data management, real-time monitoring solutions to drive operational efficiencies, and intuitive solutions that reduce outages and downtime.

What’s interesting is that the junior-level employees have emerged as the Bluebolt engine, with about 65 percent of ideas implemented with clients coming from those associates. Maybe it’s thanks to their close customer relationship where they face the everyday problems – and also get ideas on how to solve them?

Bluebolt gets AI assistent

In addition to the customer benefits, Bluebolt has really energized the innovation spirit among our employees and made them contributors independently of role and level. Recently, we announced the integration of a Gen AI-powered innovation assistant in collaboration with Microsoft to supercharge the innovative capacity even more. We also host regular Bluebolt hackathons and ideathons that involve both associates and clients, and recently launched innovation days to continue to advance idea generation and implementation in collaboration with clients.

Learn more about the Bluebolt program.