Idea Management - Innovation Management

Your new product pipeline is only as good as the ideas coming into it. Top Innovators consider the idea management process to be the number one lever to increase sales of new products. (Arthur D. Little – Innovation Excellence Study).
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 FEI as a predictable, repeatable process to generate game-changing new products as well as incremental innovations, to maintain their competitive leadership.

Idea suggestion and management processes and software have been used for several decades with mixed results.
At Innovation Framework Technologies, we have studied multiple implementations and analyzed company feed-back to define a set of key best practices that are now fully embedded in our approach and software solution.

They can be summarized around 6 areas:
   1. Focusing your idea submission
   2. Facilitating your idea submissions
   3. Making meaningful connections between ideas, insights and people
   4. Nurturing your ideas before evaluating them
   5. Organizing your evaluation and decision process
   6. Motivating your staff

Results

Companies who have followed those Best Practices have the following results:

More innovative BIG ideas since they are fed from day one by relevant insights and related ideas and can be grouped to develop more powerful concepts

Ideas maturing more rapidly through valuable contribution and collaboration from relevant staff

Easier selection of best candidates for implementation through flexible evaluation phases

Shorter "time to market" of ideas selected when idea management is well connected with their downstream NPD process

Ability to identify new potential strategic arenas by looking at trends from set of ideas submitted

It also unlocked the value of collective intelligence and fostered their culture of collaborative innovation

IFT's Solution

IFT's solution provides key functionalities in 3 main areas:

Idea Management

Define strategic arenas for specific business units

Identify ideation challenges/themes for each strategic arena

Broadcast ideation challenges to any targeted set of employees

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

Quickly capture ideas and insights related to ideation strategic themes or challenges

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

Vote and comment to support collaborative development of ideas.

Review and evaluate ideas using pre-defined business criteria and weighted scoring

Communicate and animate your process through personal portal or e-mails alerts: ideas status, progress, request for information or evaluation, etc.

Use customizable metrics to measure user contribution and link it to your reward schema

Generate performance indicators and dashboards: number and status of ideas per given theme, strategic goal, business, type, geography, etc.

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

Define roles and access to information to support deployment from hundreds to thousands

Integrate the FEI system seamlessly with your Project Portfolio Management process and system.

Insight Management

Support of multiple knowledge types

Manual and automatic capture from different sources: shared directories, Microsoft SharePoint, etc.

Standards and customizable data connectors

Full Search

Correlation Engine

Instant stimuli: automatically prompt staff with most relevant ideas, insights and people to improve quality of ideas and encourage collaboration

Social networking : automatically identify and connect employees who share common areas of interest and similar insights and ideas

Key trends: displays the most correlated themes from set of ideas to help identify gaps or new areas favorable to innovation

Group ideas: assist user in clustering ideas that are correlated to build more innovative concepts

Correlation Engine

Stimuli based Idea Management

IFT-FEI, the 3rd generation Idea Management System

Example Solution Capabilities

Correlation Engine: key trends
Display the most correlated themes from a set of submitted ideas to identify new innovation fields

Correlation Maps: investigate
The correlation maps enable you to visualize useful connections between insights, ideas, commonly used terms and team members. These are represented as nodes on the map, with the intensity of correlation displayed as a series of contours. Mousing over each node displays the key connections and a description of the node itself. These correlation maps help team members identify and connect critical information and individuals to help develop and collaborate on insights and ideas.