For organisation’s that have understood the need to innovate and started out on the innovation journey, the next challenge is how to achieve and sustain high standards of innovation business outcomes. Many organisations celebrate innovation success on the back of a blockbuster product or a disruptive business model that was inspired by an aha moment. Whilst it is encouraged to celebrate your wins, organisations can neither be truly innovative nor sustain innovation success by relying on aha moments. The importance of both being innovative and sustaining innovation cannot be overstated. Sustained generation of ideas is one of the pre-requisites for sustained innovation performance. However, there are many factors that plagues sustained idea generation or idea conversion into product or service concept in organisations. This subsequently prevents either achieving positive business outcomes or being able to sustain such outcomes. Some of these factors include, lack of engagement by the workforce, lack of adequate collaboration and or cross-pollination, disconnect between innovation ideas and organisation leadership, lack of appropriate methodologies to convert ideas into concept and profitable ventures. These obstacles to idea generation and conversion are typically overcome through effective Idea Management.
Idea Management is the process of systematically fostering idea generation, collecting all ideas and the subsequent screening and ranking of those ideas, in order to emerge with the most valuable ideas to progress into a development portfolio. However, this process can be difficult to execute using tools such as email and spreadsheets. Valuable ideas typically get missed with these resources, which were not designed for idea management. To ensure highly effective idea management, organisations must thus deploy a capable idea management platform. An idea management platform is an electronic collaboration tool that is deployed for everyone or a select group across an organisation (across disciplines, business units and geographical location as required) and is used to manage collection, evaluation, ranking and portfolio building of innovation ideas.
An idea management platform offers numerous advantages, including the major ones outlined below
Enables necessary hierarchy bypass. Before innovation is truly running through the blood of everyone (if that is possible) in your organisation, allowing your innovators to bypass superiors in their quest to support the innovation effort may be necessary. One area where hierarchy typically kills innovation is at the early stage when an innovator has an idea. If the path of that idea reaching the right audience for evaluation and development depends on going through an unconvinced manager, that idea is pretty much doomed. Such barriers can be eliminated with an idea management platform, which allows innovators to put their ideas directly into a platform where it gets direct exposure to the organisation’s leadership and key decision makers.
Ensures equal traction for ideas. One of the important requirement in any brainstorming exercise is not to discriminate or judge any idea prior to the screening or evaluation phase. Collecting innovation ideas is akin to a brainstorming exercise. With a centralised idea management platform where every idea is visible across the whole organisation and has to progress via the platform idea evaluation system, all ideas will get equal traction up to the point of acceptance or rejection. The same cannot the guaranteed if an email system is used, where the individual collating the ideas can use their discretion on ideas that are worth putting forward for review and evaluation.
Allows easy and effective crowdsourcing. An idea management platform, which is always on and accessible to your innovators will enable your organisation to effortlessly collect ideas from across the entire spectrum of your innovation ecosystem – from employees, to customers and supply chain partners. Being able to collect ideas across your entire innovation ecosystem at any time, whether during working hours or otherwise, will boost quantity of idea, which logically increases the chance of getting higher numbers of quality ideas.
Helps maintain high engagement. An idea management platform is a good medium to get an organisation’s employees interest peaked in the innovation process. The transparency of the idea management process that the platform provides is proven to engender higher engagement. Additionally, by using the platform to run idea challenges, enabling interaction between employees over ideas and running a gamification league with rewards, will sustain employee’s interest and motivate them to keep churning out their best ideas.
Allows cost effective Idea Management. Any organisation serious about innovation must have an open ended ideation campaign and also run regular ideation challenges. The process of regularly trawling through email inboxes to open and transfer every single idea into excel or some other appropriate application, classifying them and sorting them into categories is a very time consuming exercise. This becomes even more so when ideation challenges are run alongside general ideation initiatives. For an organisation looking to sustain idea generation and innovation performance, this effort can be equivalent to the full time effort of an employee when using emails and excel sheets. Idea management platforms are however designed to achieve these activities in a fraction of the time as all ideas are submitted with classification and the system automatically tracks the state of the idea from submission to acceptance or rejection.
Ensures no idea is missed. When moving ideas across from one medium such as email to another like excel it is easy to miss an idea or two and if unfortunate enough, the missed idea could be that idea that would transform the organisation. With an idea management platform, ideas never get missed. If they have not been reviewed, they will always remain available for everyone to see in the system.
Data reported in an AT Kearney research on innovative companies, shows that innovation leaders spend approximately 30% of their innovation efforts on idea generation and screening (i.e. idea management). This validates the view that idea management is crucial to innovation success. However, this time should not be spent doing task such as looking for and transferring idea from inboxes to excel but instead should be spent on the high value exercises of generating the ideas and rigorously evaluating them to ensure the best ideas are progressed into development.
When selecting an idea management platform, business leaders must ensure they opt for a platform with general ideation, ideation challenge features and strong idea evaluation methodologies. This is key to collecting and evolving the best ideas and ensuring success.
If you are ready to drive your innovation performance forward through effective idea and protfolio management, visit our product page to book a no obligation demo of Innoster.