Community Oriented Idea Management Ecosystems

Jay van Zyl from the Built to Thrive blog has recently posted a useful overview of several recent community oriented idea management ecosystems or "emergent idea ecologies" involving customers in the ideation process, including approaches by Lego, 3M, Apple, BMW, Dell, Starbucks, and Salesforce.com.

Jay focuses on the interface between companies and their customer communites, and argues that traditional "internally focused" Idea Management Systems are inherently limited as

1. It becomes an administration nightmare. The more enthusiastic the organization the bigger the problem. Hundreds of ideas and only a few people to check, review, approve and re-direct ideas.
2. Volumes of ideas that have nothing to do with the business or its current challenges.
3. Dependence on specifically skilled people and a review process that is overly controlling.
4. Little- or no- follow-through on ideas to the individuals that participated in capturing ideas; resulting in damaging any further idea generation campaigns.

I believe that the problems that Jay cites are exactly the problems that traditional Idea Management Systems from Idea Management vendors have been explicitly developed to address - and they do so quite well.

I would suggest that the nub of the issue is that the examples that Jay cites are, in general, not implementations of traditional vendor developed Idea Management Systems, but rather custom in-house solutions developed by specific organisations within a specific context following a specific philosophy. In general, the organisations cited by Jay developed solutions focused predominantly on the web 2.0 front end, and did not pay strong attention to the essential back-end processes where much of the real work of innovation takes place.

Accordingly, it is quite possible to agree with a diagnosis of the limitations of many of the examples cited (they focus excessively on the front end web 2.0 idea capture processes and fail to provide sufficient support for the back end idea proecessing and implementation processes, roles and resourcing) but still endorse strongly the traditional approach to Idea Management, which arguably address very well many of the issues of concern to Jay, both internally and when interfacing outwards to customers.

Accelerating In The Turns

Innovation, of course, should be embedded in an organisation's DNA, in both good times and in bad. It should be part of how a given company improves its business, on any day and every day.
Innovation should be absolutely central to an organisation's day to day operations for a number of reasons, including that in the absence of an effective monopoly, innovation is the major means of establishing and maintaining a significant competitive advantage in a continually changing world.

Some organisations might say that the present is not a good time economically, and be tempted to pull back operations and initiatives.

The present time is indeed of course a time of turmoil and uncertainty in the economy. Costs of inputs such as oil are escalating. Global and national responses to global warming are playing out in the form of formation of carbon trading markets and other measures. The financial environment is under pressure, and risk assessments are complex in the current global market.

But such a situation also presents great opportunity. Just as in a stock market depression there are many and diverse opportunities for the astute investor to pick up investments now at bargain prices for considerable profit later, there are also ample opportunities for astute businesses in the current market environment. Shifts in response to sustainability and rising fuel prices create new markets and new opportunities. Efforts to measure and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and fuel usage often lead to improved processes and management oversight, with associated cost savings.

So, what can we say about organisational innovation in such a risky and complex environment?

Innovation might be defined as activity within an organisation or institution to harness ideas and turn them into useful organisational outputs - new products, services, processes, strategies, and operational models. An approach such as an Idea Management System backs an innovation agenda with the rigorous infrastructure and processes required to systematically capture, assess, invest in and realise the benefits from the plethora of powerful ideas within an organisation.

Innovation in general - and Idea Management in particular - is particularly important right now in the current global and economic environment.

Why? Because innovation is driven by the capture and implementation of ideas from across the organisation - and ideas can be readily generated in response to a range of diverse organisational foci.

That is, essentially the same Idea Management system that can be used to effectively generate ideas for new products and services may also be used to generate ideas for cost savings and improving efficiency in a downturn. Such a system might also be used for identifying risk and developing mitigation strategies. The same system might again be used for developing sustainability ideas and initiatives.

Now is perhaps a time for focusing on what bets, activities and projects are going to best position an organisation for security now and for improved positioning after the present global financial and economic issues are resolved. But now is certainly not the time to be scaling back on investing in and leveraging a powerful Idea Management innovation system in your organisation to capture and action ideas on how to

• reduce risk,
• reduce costs,
• generate effective sustainability initiatives that will reduce costs and/or create revenue, as well as
• developing innovative new products, services, strategies and operating models that will allow you to accelerate out of this term lengths ahead of your competitors.

The 9 Signs of a Losing Organisation

Indonesia's Professionals and Entrepreneur's Club has recently posted an article on "the 9 signs of a losing organisiation."

Coming in at number 9 is poor "Idea and Knowledge Management":

Poor Idea and Knowledge Management: cross-pollination of ideas is not facilitated; no idea management and knowledge management strategies and systems; "know-it-all" attitude; "not invented here" syndrome.

The other 8 signs proposed are:

1. Fuzzy Vision
2. Lack of Leadership Skills
3. Discouraging Culture:
4. High Bureaucracy
5. Lack of Initiative
6. Poor Vertical Communication
7. Poor Cross-functional Collaboration
8. Poor Teamwork

Being An Idea Champion In Your Organization

Lets say you are an employee or manager in a Big Company. You have a great idea. How do you get it listened to?

Synergy Blog has posted a recent article on what to do with a great idea, giving guidance to individuals within the corporate machine on how to get their ideas implemented. The recommended 6-steps are:

1. Reflect, Test, and Develop the Initial Idea
2. Find out How Ideas are Assessed or Evaluated
3. Prepare the Why Argument
4. Prepare the How Argument
5. Get Support for Your Idea
6. “Sell” Your Idea

Idea Management in the UAE

It is interesting to look at the implementation of Idea Management Systems across different cultures and languages.

A recent article in Arabian-speaking countries' news portal Al Bawaba discussed Idea Management in the UAE by focusing on Dubai World’s "Suggestion and Reward Scheme" (SRS), supervised and run by Dubai World's Business Excellence Centre.

According to the article:

SRS received 755 suggestions in the first six months of 2008, of which 131 were implemented. These helped saving Dhs16 million for Dubai World, while the rewards given away totaled Dhs.570,000. The number of suggestions submitted, approved and implemented since 2001 to the first half of 2008 totaled 1442, and the total amount rewarded touched Dhs4.3 million.

Ms. Awatif Mohammed, Head of the SRS programme, reported that during this period:

. . . the SRS has received several prominent international awards, such as the 2007 Idea of the Year Award - Productivity Category from ideasUK, the 2007 First Prize in International Poster Competition from ideasUK and the 2008 Idea of the Year Award - Finance Category and runners up in Productivity Category.

There are approximately 9 Dhs to the US dollar.

The Three Primary Value Positionings For Idea Management Software Tools

Jeffrey Phillips has added more to his recent critique on idea gathering tools such as Dell's IdeaStorm and SalesForce.com's SalesForce Ideas. In a recent article posted to the Innovation Tools website, Phillips argues that

• the ideas generated need processing, and for Dell's IdeaStorm with over 9000 ideas submitted a brief cursory evaluation of 5 minutes per idea would take 450,000 minutes or 750 man-hours - a third of a year FTE. In addition, ideas from customers or partners may need legal review for IP ownership, adding to the time involved.
• Social Networking or Crowdsourcing sites do not provide workflow processes for idea evaluation and selection beyond "a simple voting or rating process."
• Social Networking and Crowdourcing approaches are claimed to generate less relevant ideas as:
  

. . . these programs primarily generate very incremental ideas, and since these approaches are very open, collaborative and web-based, they expose ideas to a large number of people. The larger the group, the more the thinking and ideas will revert to the mean. So you can't expect really insightful or disruptive ideas from this approach

I think that Phillip's key message is that an Idea Management system is more than a front end for capturing ideas, it is also a back end for efficiently and effectively processing and filtering those ideas and commercialising or investing in the best ones - for a significant commercial return on innovation investment.

I think that anyone involved with Idea Management Systems and indeed innovation generally will easily find consensus on this key message.

But I don't think that that one point alone is a damning critique of Dell's approach. Let's grant that assessing Dell's existing ideas costs 1/3 of a FTE resource? I suspect Dell could afford it. Indeed they could also afford additional extra resources to develop the criteria against which to assess ideas and to give relevant training to their staff involved in assessing the 9000 ideas and afford a team of reviewers and evaluators. The key issue here should not be the cost of evaluating ideas, but the net return on innovation investment after the most promising ideas have been selected and developed and commercialised.

More to the point from my point of view is that Dell, like many organisations, will already have systems in place for New Product Development. Large organisations will typically already have significant investment in software, systems and processes for New Product Development, process improvement, and input into strategic direction and performance improvement - systems which may have already been trialled 'proven' and committed to to a greater or lesser extent. In addition, organisations may have commitments to existing IT infrastructure such as portals and other communications technologies. The question arises therefore of where Idea Management Solutions 'sit' in relation to these existing systems and processes.

There seem to me to be 3 clear positionings for Idea Management Software solutions:

1. An Idea Management System is expected to generate and capture ideas and feed them into existing systems and processes which will then filter and assess them.
   In this case the Idea Management tool itself is not expected to provide significant initial business evaluation and filtering of the ideas beyond peer review or a very rapid initial assessment (e.g. a go/no-go decision for promotion to the next stage or a selection from a list of defined options) by an assigned business representative
   
2. An Idea Management System is expected to integrate with existing systems or processes by providing suitably qualified ideas to the appropriate entry point.
   In this case the Idea Management tool is expected to provide significant initial business evaluation and filtering of the ideas, but more extensive evaluation and development of opportunities is to be fulfilled by other organisational systems and processes.
   
3. An Idea Management System is expected to support and facilitate a complete end-to-end stage-gate process from idea generation to idea commercialisation and value realisation

Depending on what the organisation wants, there are distinct value criteria to assess an Idea Management System against.

• In case 1 above, the system must generate an appropriate volume of reasonable quality ideas.
• In case 2 the system must not only generate ideas, it must put them through an appropriate process of qualification and evaluation to filter the best ideas to forward to the next stage in the system.
• In case 3 the system must be capable of stewarding ideas through a complete stage-gate process from idea generation to commercial realisation.

The question of whether and how an Idea Management System integrates with existing processes for market testing, developing a business case, prototyping, project and portfolio management and other activities is an interesting one, and different vendors have positioned their software in different ways to address this question.

It seems to me that most Idea Management software tools are focused around cases 1 or 2, for the primary reason that organisations do typically already have significant investments in existing systems and processes for activities such as NPD, process improvement, strategy and performance management.

In the case of Dell, they appear to have clearly positioned their Idea Management tool in the first category. My reading of Dell's Idea Management process is that what Dell primarily wanted was a front end for generating ideas to feed a stream of ideas into their existing relevant organisational processes such as NPD.

While I agree with Phillips that an Idea Management tool can provide additional value by providing focus to generate more better quality and more relevant ideas and can further develop that value through efficient initial back-end processes for evaluating and filtering ideas, I don't think that focusing the tool on the front-end of idea capture is inherently a fault. The question is whether the back-end processes at Dell efficiently pick up the slack and process the ideas efficiently, whether enough appropriate evaluation and selection is incorporated into the front-end tool, and most importantly whether the system generates enough commercial value and return on innovation investment. These are, I expect, questions that Dell will eventually answer for themselves from their own experience.

An additional point to raise in relation to Phillips' critique is that we need to think carefully about what value an organisation is seeking when it engages employees, customers or partners for ideas. In addition to the commercial value of evaluated, selected and implemented ideas, there is value in engaging customers and employees with the company, in capturing market intelligence and trends, and in general developing a closer relationship with customers, employees and stakeholder groups. For example, the value of social networking tools for enhancing the relationship with customers is described in a recent MIT Sloane Management Review article through the concept of Virtual Customer Environments, summarised here and here. So the possibility exists that regardless of the success of social networking or crowdsourcing tools for generating commercial value as a front end for innovation, such tools may generate commercial value in themselves through enhancing the relationship with key stakeholder groups such as employees or customers.

e-week on BrightIdea.com's WebStorm 5.0

e-week recently reviewed BrightIdea.com's version 5.0 release of their WebStorm product.

Webstorm seems to be a front end Idea Capture system modelled on Corporate Social Networking principles that can be used either as a front end to BrightIdea.com's Idea Management System or independently as a collaboration and Idea Capture tool to harness customer or employee input and sentiment.

e-week write:

"Similar to Facebook or LinkedIn, WebStorm 5.0 lets users build personal profiles, create or join personal networks, send private messages, search for experts, and earn points and recognition for their ideas. Users can submit, vote and comment on the ideas of others.

Then, admins—such as product managers looking for feedback from customers, or conference coordinators creating virtual communities that parallel in-person events—will receive real-time reporting on community activity and usage patterns. This will include metrics on individual performance, activity levels and trends, the company said."