Case Study: Davidson College achieves transparent, mission-aligned, cost-efficient crowdsourced innovation with IdeaScale

The Best Outcome is the Process

Davidson College, a selective liberal arts college in North Carolina with about 1,800 students, needed a transparent, democratic way to surface and test riskier, transformational ideas alongside its existing incremental improvement processes. In 2017 Director of Innovation Initiatives Kristen Eshleman launched IdeaTrek, a crowdsourced innovation program using IdeaScale to invite faculty, staff, students, and alumni to contribute to both always-on suggestion campaigns and time-bound strategic challenges.

The college formalized roles (Innovation Council, Design and Pilot Teams, Innovation Team, senior leaders) and a staged process—intake, validation, piloting, and go/no‑go decisions—so ideas could be rapidly tested and iterated. The approach was repurposed during COVID to improve remote learning and commencement logistics and has produced concrete results: a reworked academic calendar, an online wellness offering, a faculty digital-learning bootcamp with 96% attendance, new courses and internship credit, and a more mission-aligned, transparent, and cost-efficient pathway for evidence-based decision making.

Davidson College

Kristen Eshleman

Director of Innovation Initiatives