Making Ideation a Competitive Strength

Ideation is evolving as a category as more and more organizations seek to tap into the collective wisdom of their employees. Ideation, or Idea Management, is a process whereby an organization can inspire creativity, capture it, create a plan, and take action. It can (or should) play an important role within your digital transformation strategy by allowing employees to drive the innovation process. As I always say, the more you involve people in the process the more likely they will support the outcome of the process.

This is not so much a blog post as an outline supporting the concept of Ideation, and how to support it within the enterprise:

Its about surfacing ideas from your employees that may otherwise be lost within the daily tasks, with no way of being shared with peers and management

• Cross-functional
• Opens up dialog across all employees
• Allows people to provide feedback from their unique perspectives, making the overall solution more robust, grounded

Method for moving an idea through a formal review process, or project to where action can be taken – and innovation measured

• Reduced costs
• Improved customer experience
• New product introduction
• Improved internal systems and processes

Within most organizations, idea management more about aligning with their internal processes

• Employees submit ideas
• Employees vote on best ideas
• After review by management, the best ideas are promoted to projects
• Employees with winning ideas get recognition or rewards

One problem with ideation is that it is usually disconnected from the rest of the collaboration platform — seen as a standalone activity

• Can lead to lost information
• Ideas could be out of context to historical projects or information
• If outside of normal tools and systems, could be a loss of productivity, or even adoption
• Discovery can be difficult
• Studies have shown that people are more likely to respond if others are already discussing — so the more activity, the more likely others are to join in the discussion

When linked to social tools within the enterprise, it becomes a natural fit for employee dialog and can be better linked to knowledge management activities and collected knowledge

• Product team or business unit-led initiatives
• Monthly challenges
• Incorporate it into the new product introduction (NPI) process
• Community-led

Creating a more intelligent “digital workplace” means better incorporating the tools employees use to communicate in ways that also benefit the business

• A more natural fit for the way teams work together
• Pick up on tacit knowledge otherwise lost by most systems
• Needs to continually evolve