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The Power of Idea Management to Unlock Innovation Potential
Innovation Insights
Innovation Insights
Innovation Insights
Innovation Insights
5 min read

The Power of Idea Management to Unlock Innovation Potential

Innovation is the lifeblood of organizations, driving growth and competitive advantage. To harness the creative potential of employees and stakeholders, idea management plays a crucial role.

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Innovation is the lifeblood of organizations, driving growth and competitive advantage. To harness the creative potential of employees and stakeholders, idea management plays a crucial role.

What is Idea Management?

Idea management encompasses three essential steps: collection, processing, and implementation.

During the collection phase, ideas are generated and gathered from various sources. These can be internal sources such as employees, or external sources such as customers, or startups and innovators. 

The processing phase involves qualifying, refining, and shortlisting ideas. This ensures the most promising ones move forward that fit with your goals.

Last but not least, the implementation phase turns selected ideas into projects that can generate tangible outcomes.

Best Practices for Idea Management:

Most use cases for idea management revolve around the concept of "challenges." A challenge is a targeted campaign designed to collect ideas over a specific period. Although a continuous idea management can be a valuable use case for many organizations, setting a limited time period can increase engagement by creating an incentive.

Challenges typically comprise of five steps: 

  1. Identify the problem
  2. Issue the challenge to a target audience
  3. Collect and evaluate ideas
  4. Shortlist the best ones
  5. Implement them

The most common pitfall of idea management is the “idea sandbox syndrome.” This occurs when ideas accumulate without concrete follow-up or implementation. Besides the obvious lack of generating a tangible result for the challenge organizer, this can also decrease employee engagement.

This is why choosing the right tool is key to being able to run idea challenges and bring them to implementation.

Choosing the Right Software

Being able to run idea challenges requires software that allows for the collection and sorting of submissions. However, when selecting any new software, organizations face three key challenges: 

  1. Tools multiplicity - we already use many different tools on a daily basis
  2. Onboarding - training and adoption
  3. Retention - keeping users over the long term

To address these challenges, an integrated approach leveraging existing tools proves beneficial. Integration with familiar communication tools such as Microsoft Teams, Yammer, Workplace from Facebook, or Slack enhances engagement and user adoption. However, being able to take ideas all the way to the implementation phase is crucial, which is why many organizations consider their idea management needs in context of their full innovation management needs.

Idea Management vs End-to-End Innovation Management

The market for idea management tools has shifted from only idea management to end-to-end innovation management as it is a fundamental component of a fuller process.

An end-to-end innovation management platform can provide benefits beyond just gathering ideas because the ideas generated during an idea challenge can be connected to features that enable implementation. For example, you can directly launch and track projects in the same platform. Or, leverage qualified solutions from existing partnerships to bring the idea to life. 

Idea Management is a Must-Have in Your Innovation Process

Idea management is an indispensable component of the innovation management process. To overcome the "idea sandbox syndrome," where numerous ideas accumulate without concrete follow-up, organizations need functional tools. 

Idea management solutions should provide the necessary support to transform ideas into actionable projects, enabling organizations to unlock their innovation potential. By implementing best practices, such as running challenges and incentivizing participation, organizations can maximize the value derived from their idea management initiatives. With the right approach and tools in place, organizations can drive innovation, propel growth, and stay ahead in today's competitive landscape.

References

The Recipe For Innovation: A Conversation With Stanford Professor Yossi Feinberg
Innovation Insights
Innovation Insights
Innovation Insights
Innovation Insights
5 min read

The Recipe For Innovation: A Conversation With Stanford Professor Yossi Feinberg

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Meet Yossi Feinberg, professor at Stanford Business School specializing in entrepreneurship. He’s the director of the executive program Driving Innovation and New Ventures for Established Organizations and co-director of an online digital transformation program.

We sat down with Professor Feinberg to gather his insights from more than 25 years of working with executives to drive innovation. Watch the video for the highlights, or read on for more insights!

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity

Do you see an increase in innovation in large organizations in recent years? And if so, why?

There's a sense of urgency that I haven't seen in the last five or six years. I think that urgency is coming from the fact that the world is actually changing fast.

Consumers expect things to be faster and newer. They find it easier to switch between technologies or between offerings, which is true also for business customers. 

On the other hand, there's also higher expectations for more sustainable products. And at the same time, every industry and every company is under pressure, either from existing rivals or from disruption, because there are many more startups who are now attacking almost every industry.

How do you see companies react to this pressure?

One of the things that we see companies do is react by reorganizing how work is done. An example is companies actually start to organize by product, and they push decision making closer to where the product is created. For example, companies may have product managers who then are in charge of pushing innovation in their own product domains. This brings the customer voice into the process of innovation to provide products faster, and which have a better product market fit

Another example is companies moving to a digital transformation approach where they're trying to digitize the business, create more opportunities and innovation through new business models or through applications of digital technologies. 

But unfortunately, what we see from research out there is that many of these approaches are highly challenging to execute. For example, there are surveys that claim that digital transformation projects fail at the rate of 80% or even higher. And the real problem is that once you try something innovative in an organization and it fails, it becomes much more difficult. The organization naturally resists innovation, and people are a little bit jaded when you try to innovate again.

What do you tell leaders coming to you asking for help?

The first thing I tell them is that there's no recipe. There's no one magic formula that you can just execute innovation in every organization and be successful. If we had that, you would have seen it already. 

The second thing I tell them is that there is a special recipe for their organization. There are actually insights and tools that help each individual organization find its way into successful innovation.

So how do they find their recipe?

So usually, the starting point is identifying the types of innovation that your organization wants to pursue. And with that, you have to start thinking about where will the ideation happen? Where will the best ideas happen? Sometimes it's inside the organization, sometimes it's outside the organization. 

Next, you need to evaluate those ideas

And obviously, the most important thing is then executing on those innovations. And executing on those innovations means deciding on what organizational model will execute those innovations. Do you want to incubate ideas? Do you want to work with startups? Do you want a corporate venture capital app? Do you want a portfolio of all these things? There are many ways for a company to actually go after those innovative new projects and you have to make your decision on building those. 

But there are two things that are fundamental as you start thinking about all these elements of identifying, generating, evaluating, executing, and growing those innovative new projects. And those two things are the following. One is the information flow in your organization. How does information flow to the people who drive innovation? And the second part, and maybe the most fundamental part, is your organizational culture.

Why is information flow so important for organizations?

Well, when you go into almost every large company and you ask leaders, “What's the innovation that's happening in your organization?” It's rarely the case that they have a complete map of every innovation that's happening in the organization.

Information flow is dynamic and important from that perspective. But it's not only inside the organization. There's all the information that needs to come from outside the organization whether it's startups, whether it is new technologies that are coming in, maybe trends with consumers or your customers or things on the supply chain. There's always a changing world in which information is crucial when it comes to innovating in your organization

But why is this information so crucial? It's because the people who are making those decisions at the innovation level, at the startup level, inside the large organization, they're facing a lot of uncertainty and ambiguity. So having this information and knowing what's going on elsewhere in the organization and outside in the world of the startups or the new technologies or the trends, that is crucial for being able to execute better on innovation projects.

For example, having information on trends or competing startups could be a crucial tool in deciding whether a project is a go or a no-go, whether one project should get more resources than another project, or move faster because this is how we're going to win. Those decisions can help us figure out where to put our resources. And in some cases, what do we need to shut down and prevent having those “walking dead” projects in our organization?

What about the challenge of building a culture that supports innovation?

This challenge has been around for decades; many have researched it and written about it. But we have to remember that organizational culture starts with people. And when we think about the people who are going to drive innovation in the organization and think about what they need. 

They not only need assets and best practices and guidance and support, they also need a community. And they also need support from others in the organization. It's not enough to think about culture as an isolated thing for a group of people who are driving innovation. It's much more important to think about it holistically for all of the organization. 

The nice thing here is that it actually connects to the previous challenge that we talked about, which is information flow. The same notion of a network, of a connection between people that transfers information, can also help innovators find people who will support them.

It also helps people find opportunities to engage and support and participate in new projects. This helps transfer attitudes and create shared values that will change people's eventual behavior and their underlying assumptions that will lead them to be more innovative personally. That is how to foster a culture of innovation throughout the organization.

Each business function has its own tools and platforms. What is the role of a technology platform for driving and monitoring innovation in larger organizations?

I'm a strong believer that technology can enable and support innovation in large organizations. The main reason is that it's not technology for the sake of technology, but technology can help us with this information flow problem that we have. 

It can also be a tool that creates a community. So it helps us with transferring those values that eventually translate into this culture of innovation. More importantly, with technology you can make sure that you have best practices, that you're anchored in the business values that innovation can create, and that you can implement better decision making. And in many cases, technology is what helps you to scale whatever solutions you come up with. And that's an extremely powerful tool.

How to Get More Out of Your Open Innovation Partnerships
Innovation Insights
Innovation Insights
Innovation Insights
Innovation Insights
5 min read

How to Get More Out of Your Open Innovation Partnerships

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Do you collaborate with external partners to co-create new value? Then be sure to check out Capgemini’s latest report The power of open minds: How open innovation offers benefits for all.

The report surveyed more than 1,000 large organizations to find that:

  • 83% of organizations say that open innovation is a critical success factor in achieving sustainability goals
  • 75% of organizations say that open innovation is critical to addressing complex business issues
  • 71% of organizations plan to increase investment in open innovation in the next two years

However, most organizations have been unable to tap into the full potential of open innovation. Among the recommendations made by Capgemini is to adopt technology enablers to manage and coordinate open innovation initiatives. Thomas Girard, Bloomflow CEO & cofounder, explains in the report how “Innovation management platforms serve as a catalyst for an open innovation strategy, helping align organizations and their partners while uncovering valuable pain points.”

Unlocking the power of data is crucial to transforming open innovation processes. The ability to easily extract insights on project success rates with specific partners is key to improving open innovation outcomes. Innovation management platforms serve as a catalyst for an open innovation strategy, helping align organizations and their partners while uncovering valuable pain points
Thomas Girard / CEO & cofounder at Bloomflow. Source: Capgemini

For more in-depth information on the challenges and solutions of effective open innovation, check out the full report here.

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