Here's some additional explanation from the Rotar's blog: "Selecting the best ideas is a pretty open process. Everyone in the company gets to vote for the ideas they like best before expert panels review and assess the submissions against a comprehensive score sheet."

Avanade's customer advisory council is part of the process, helping guide the teams on direction, and finalists each year get a chance to present at an annual employee training event. The attendees of that event get the final vote. The winning entry from the 2013 contest, technology called SocialSight that provides analytics and marketing personalization capabilities to retailers, has already been deployed for several customers.

"It's important to give people a specific challenge that is broad enough not to hamper creativity but that has a reasonable chance of being useful," Rotar said.

Aside from the big annual contest, Avanade supports small-scale weekly hackathons across its more than 70 worldwide locations that are focused on concerns that might be unique to a particular customer or to regional adoption trends.

While the cost of supporting these local activities is embedded into regional expense structures, the prize for the bigger contest comes from Avanade's central research and development budget.

"It was really a leap of faith from our CEO, who truly believes in innovation," he said.

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Another major focus for Rotar's innovation team was creating the playbook for what the integrator has dubbed Innovation Days, intimate brainstorming sessions intended to help customers think through their solution needs. There are close to 100 of these events held each year around the world, so this document provides tips and techniques for how to structure them.

The idea is to use innovations or ideas from other industries to help customers reset expectations for the structure an application or technology solution should take. Rotar offers the contrasting examples of customer loyalty programs for airlines versus retailers. In the case of airlines, digital marketing systems are geared to "prefer" more frequent fliers. Among retailers, however, consumers they want to buy more usually get more attention during campaigns. Avanade challenges its customers to flip these ideas upside down.

"We're trying to make this not a separate thing for the business, but something that's embedded in the way that we do business every day," Rotar said. "It helps us deepen the customer relationships that we have."

Moving forward, the integrator is developing an internal "innovation marketplace" portal to help expose the best ideas from region to region. But that is a work in progress.