The Harvard Business Review on the 6 Stages of Idea Management

The June Issue of The Harvard Business Review had a nice article on Idea Management Systems, which the authors, Morten Hansen and Julian Birkinshaw, called "innovation value chains."

In Hansen and Birkinshaw's model, the innovation value chain consists of stages of

1. Idea Generation
2. Conversion
3. Diffusion

or more explicitly, stages of

1. In-house idea creation
2. Cross-pollination of ideas across units
3. External collaboration on ideas with parties outside the firm
4. Selection of ideas through screening and provision of initial funding
5. Development of ideas - moving from idea to result
6. Spread or dissemination of the developed innovation across the organization (by which the authors mean developing appropriate metrics to measure the success of the innovation)
   

Coincidentally, each of these 6 stages corresponded to work published predominantly from the Harvard Business School stable of authors, specifically:

1. Teresa Amabile et al "How to kill creativity (HBR Sept-Oct 1998); Jamming (John Kao, 1996)
2. Evans and Wolf's "Collaboration rules" (HBR, July-Aug 2006); "Co-evolving at last," Eisenhart and Galunic (HBR Jan-Feb 2000)
3. Democratizing Innovation (von Hippel, 2005); Blue Ocean Strategy (Kim and Mauborgne, 2004); Open Innovation (Chesbrough, 2003)
4. Hamel's "Bringing Silicon Valley inside" (HBR Sept-Oct 1999); Corporate Venturing )Block and MacMillan, 1993)
5. 10 Rules for Strategic Innovators (Govindarajan and Trimble, 2005); The Innovators Solution (Christensen and Raynor, 2003)
6. Payback (Sirkin and Andrew 2007); Kim and Mauborgne's "Tipping point leadership" (HBR April 2003)

Hansen and Birkinshaw's framework is high level and discusses principles rather than processes, but provides an interesting perspective on Idea Management Systems.