Promote Innovative Thinking with Idea Capture Techniques

The aggressively competitive business environment challenges enterprises to come up with innovative products and services to survive and be successful. A collective knowledge of the employees, customers and other stakeholders  in the organization will definitely give more number of innovating ideas than a handful of people struggling to beat through competition. For the global enterprises, the large workforce along with their customer base works out as their strength that can be used to collect innovative ideas for improving the products and services.


Idea management system is a large umbrella under which the organizations enlist the creativity and  innovative inputs  of employees, customers, vendors and other stakeholders for improvement in various areas in the organization. Idea management is  defined as  a structured process to capture ideas and includes collection, handling, storing, improving, evaluating and prioritizing selection and distribution of  ideas with the help of methods and tools. Being an integral part of the innovation process, this is relevant for all ideas- from new product development to incremental improvements in existing products and services.


A critical element in the gathering of ideas is the ability to collaborate. With technology and social networking sites changing the way individuals interact and collaborate these qualities of the social media  can be integrated to gather ideas. Organizations with an innovative mindset have created  idea capturing platforms to capture  ideas and nurture them. This helps not only to solve the existing problems but also creates a cycle of innovative thinking and involves customers, partners and vendors in the product development process.


The idea capturing platform besides encouraging participation among the employees, also enables idea pipeline management. Besides this helps to build communities, brings in a collaborative environment and helps enterprises leverage on the social networking features to bring in the expertise.


Whirlpool, the global appliance manufacturer has successfully introduced an idea management system to capture ideas from their clients and employees. The company with the use of technology established a sophisticated IT infrastructure called ‘Innovation E-Space’ which is open to anyone at Whirlpool with intranet access. Whirlpool employees could now look for inspiration by perusing insights captured in the system, use these to spark new thinking, as well as submit their own ideas and insights apart from  building on existing ideas. Further, the online tutorials helped them to turn their ideas into business concepts.


Today, the 'Innovation E-Space' has more than hundred thousand hits from Whirlpool’s employees worldwide and has become an indispensable part in capturing ideas, share, learn and collaborate on innovative projects and has facilitated the brand to earn billion of dollars through innovation.


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