Idea Management System – A Structured Approach

Ideas are the backdrop of every inventions, product innovation and services. As the products and services takes form and generates expected results, these are transformed into business for the benefit of both consumer and the provider. The increase in product awareness has led to increase in consumer demands for more innovative products, services and techniques which required new and innovative ideas.


Organizations the world over look for ideas from various sources. This includes the internal workforce, clients, vendors, partners and end-users. However, the advent of the internet and the World Wide Web has facilitated enterprises with a wider reach to capture ideas from a diversified group.  Use of an idea management system facilitates enterprises to manage, monitor and implement innovation in a structured way. Being structured, it provides discipline, clear milestones and metrics as against a qualitative and unstructured process.


At Ericsson,  a collaborative idea management tool  called IdeaBoxes enables  all employees to innovate everyday across the organization. Implemented in 2008,  this  idea management system was pulled based and self-organizing.  With  many and diverse innovation needs across the organization,  a structured approach was required to channelize ideas from multiple sources to multiple destinations in the organization. The launch of IdeaBoxes, led to a broad adoption of ideas across all business units, markets,  R&D, sales and marketing dept. Slowly, IdeaBoxes grew to become the de facto idea management tool across Ericsson, replacing most local tools. After three years of implementation, the idea database at Ericsson was filled with 15000 ideas, 30000 comments and over 10000 users. Out of these,  hundreds of ideas, from incremental to disruptive ones,  have been used in  the development of  new products, services and new processes  at different levels within the organization.


The Idea Management System that has been  defined as a structured and disciplined approach to manage  innovation facilitate enterprises  to manage idea generation,  capture, collaboration, assessment, implementation and monitoring of idea outcomes. Made up of five components, this includes:


  • A Front-End system that helps to capture and develop ideas

  • A Back-End system that will help to implement  the idea funnel

  • An organizational architecture that will  facilitate idea generation and capturing process

  • IT systems to support the workflow

  • Metrics for idea pipeline management and determining the business value and monitoring implementation process of the ideas generated.


As technology evolved, software solutions were also developed by the IT giants and service providers to support idea management.  When Cisco Systems the world leader in networking communications technology was challenged to improve its productivity across its European arm,   Matt Ashman, Cisco’s European Innovation Manager, with the help of an idea management system  set up i-Zone an idea management portal to capture ideas and feedback from the online community. The result was a collection of more than 400 ideas, 5000 users, with 500 votes and comments.


Out of the ideas collected more than 10 ideas had entered the developmental phase and three of the ideas had reached the implementation stage with several in prototype. However, the best out of the lot was the one single technology idea from i-Zone that when launched in the market had a revenue potential of   multi-million dollar for the next three years. The Idea management solutions have  matured and are today adopted by the mainstream business.

 

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