Welcome to Innovation Framework Technologies

Your fast track to Innovation Excellence

Idea Management

Your new product pipeline is only as good as the ideas coming into it. In fact, the Front End of Innovation process is consistently rated as being the most important driver for new product revenues. Best-in-class companies focus on idea management as a predictable, repeatable process and continue to invest in enhancing and extending the process to maintain their competitive leadership.

The idea management capability in our NPD solution is not part of our separate, advanced Front End of Innovation solution. In particular, only our FEI solution has the unique, patented correlation engine and correlation maps. IFT therefore offers the following options to support a customer’s FEI process.

1.Deploy our NPD solution and use its inbuilt idea management capability

2. Deploy our advanced FEI solution fully integrated with our NPD solution

3.Deploy our advanced FEI solution without our NPD solution, because an existing NPD solution is already in place, or your organization is not yet ready to deploy NPD automated processes.

IFT’s Solution

IFT’s NPD solution includes an integrated Idea Management capability to issue ideation challenges, capture and develop ideas, search the idea bank, and evaluate ideas to select those to be proposed as development projects. The result is a systematic way of tapping into the talent and knowledge of your organization to fill your innovation pipeline great new ideas.

Specifically, our idea management capability enables you to:

Define strategic arenas for specific business units

Identify ideation challenges for each strategic arena

Broadcast ideation challenges to a targeted set of employees

Define straightforward workflows and alerts for how insights and ideas should be captured, developed and evaluated

Quickly capture ideas related to ideation challenges

Support collaborative development of ideas and communication between employees

Capture structured idea information (risks, value proposition, competitive intelligence, etc.) and unstructured information (comments, expert advice, documents, links, etc.) as the idea develops

Retain all ideation information in an Ideation Bank, which can be used for manual search

Evaluate ideas using pre-defined business criteria and weighted scoring

Enable employees to track the status of ideas submitted, and facilitate communications between submitter and evaluator

Generate performance metrics and dashboards for employees for feedback and to enable ideation reward and recognition mechanisms

Generate performance metrics and dashboards for Ideation Challenges to evaluate their effectiveness

Flow selected ideas automatically into our NPD solution’s portfolio and stage-gate management capabilities

Example Solution Capabilities

Related NPD Processes