Spigit is a Social Innovation software company that helps its clients drive business growth. Its customers – who number over a thousand – include industry giants like Overstock.com, Allstate, Citi, and Estee Lauder. Last week, the company was named as the 67th-fastest growing private company in America by Inc. Magazine, having achieved a three-year growth rate of 3780 percent.

It was the fourth-fastest growing company in the software category, and sixth-fastest in San Francisco. Spigit’s success comes from the increasingly popular trend of enterprises tapping into their most valuable asset, their employees, to solve business challenges. This new, open approach is replacing the old way companies solved problems and ran their innovation departments.

“Innovation is the lifeblood for business growth,” Spigit’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer Shail Khiyara told Crowdsourcing.org. “Companies are realizing that a significant portion of their investment is in their people. It’s people that drive innovation, and ideas can really come from anywhere – inside your organization, outside your organization, from your customers, vendors, suppliers.”

To help both large and small companies come up with crowdsourced solutions to problems, Spigit offers two main key products. The first is a premium one called SpigitEngage.

SpigitEngage activates your crowd by integrating emergent social collaboration with traditional workflow and analytics, enabling purposeful crowd innovation that drives results for your business. It helps you extract actionable business data for revenue-generation, product development, process improvements, improving costs and more.

Ideas are voted on, and individuals can offer their feedback. The best ideas rise to the top, improving the reputation of whoever submitted them. The platform offers a variety of tools to visualize and sort through the submission data. Gamification aspects such as leaderboards and prizes for the top brainstormers help encourage participation, and Khiyara believes what really gets people to contribute is an intrinsic human propensity to engage in solving challenges.

“Everyone has a voice and a desire to drive change, to create something new and iconic,” he said.

For businesses, this can mean a faster, cheaper, and more effective way to innovate, solve problems, and drive revenue growth. It also promotes engagement with and loyalty to the company.

“There are studies that show that higher engagement levels in an organization translate directly to profitability,” Khiyara explained. “It also drives an open culture around innovation. It doesn’t make the employees feel like they’re helping to grow the business. It makes them realize they are growing the business. From an executive level, it doesn’t make the job of the senior executive a lonely job at the top. With a platform like this, you now have the ability to reach out to the extreme edge of your organization and get feedback within minutes or hours, depending on how long you want the challenge to run.”

Spigit’s second offering is ICON, a freemium platform that focuses exclusively on questions and answers. Though it initially launched in May as a private, internal crowdsourcing platform, subsequent releases have included the ability to include crowds outside of the organization as well.

Anyone can start a private invite-only, public or company-wide, instant community at no cost. It’s quite different from traditional ways of gathering feedback, like surveys and panels, because those operate on people's memories of what happened in the past and are retrospective. ICON captures what crowds are thinking right now and uses pairwise comparison to surface the most popular ideas to deliver answers actionable insight in real-time.

Given his company's position on the Inc. Magazine list and the new product it has recently rolled out, it is not surprising that Khiyara is optimistic about the future of Social Innovation software.

“It’s not a fad,” he said. “It’s definitely here to stay.”

Disclosure: Spigit is a client of Crowdsourcing.org.