Employees, customers, and suppliers are a vast resource of ideas. For a multitude of reasons these ideas don’t surface sufficiently. In order to access this great pool of ideas, a company needs to set up a process and an organisation that supports idea management and, in many circumstances, an idea management tool to automate the processes and store ideas.
Setting up idea management involves addressing a number of subjects. Some examples are:
- Making sure enough ideas are generated. It is known that some of the most innovative organisations have a ratio of 1000 to 1, meaning that they need 1000 ideas to produce 1 successful innovation.
- Appointing the right people to review the ideas.
- Supplying feedback to idea generators can improve the quality of a specific idea and motivates them to keep submitting ideas that constantly increase in quality.
- Improving the quality and professionalism of generated ideas. Leaving the process unmanaged, most ideas will not be much more than just that. Professional idea generation will attain a level of quality addressing who the idea will benefit, how it will improve company results, how it is to be implemented, etc.
- Who are to be involved in generating ideas? Do you wish to do so company wide and are you involving customers or suppliers? Going external with idea management means the idea management organisation has to be highly professional.