Revealed: Recipe for Successful Ideation

By Ankit Agarwal

“I start with an idea and then it turns into something else.”

- Pablo Picasso

Innovation is indispensable for

organisations to grow and thrive and

ideas are the backbone of innovation.

The importance of creativity and new

ideas has never been so discerning and

recognized. A formalized ideation is

widely accepted form of innovation

process that plays a key role in

serendipitous discovery of ideas,

cognitive and collaborative interaction

between people, personal and

professional motivation and emotional

engagement. Not surprisingly, technology has become

the critical edge to innovate faster and

demonstrate greater agility than the

competition. However, the organizations

need to understand the method to

exploit technology and kick-start

Innovation. A recent MIT Sloan Survey

found that a top issue facing businesses

today is stagnant or slow-growing

revenue, often the consequence of the

company’s lack of adaptability or

inability to dive into the realm of

Innovation. To support these efforts,

businesses are looking toward managing

the innovation process and stimulating

more collaboration and engagement

among employees, customers and

partners through events like Ideation.. Channelized and managed ideation can

help transforming ideas into marketable

goods and services giving a competitive

advantage to organisations triggering

exponential growth. Any misalignment

or undermining of innovation process

could, however, hinder organization’s

growth.

Defining Ideation

“Ideation is the process of creating new ideas (Wikipedia)”. Etymologically, we see that words ending in “-

ation” typically describe a process, and the root of “ideation” is “idea.” So it’s about a process for soliciting

ideas and transforming the best ones into marvels. Thus, to me, what used to be called “brainstorming”

now seems to be termed as “ideation” just like selling an old wine in a new bottle.

In simple terms, Ideation is all about

accumulating ideas. It can be from

Employees, Internal stakeholders like

Marketing/Sales/Support,

Partners/Vendors, Customer/Client

and/or Social Media. By intelligently

leveraging crowds and communities,

teams can further garner unique and

innovative ideas. Businesses are also

able to engage with outside experts,

such as customers, suppliers and

partners, to collaborate on ideas and

contribute feedback from additional

relevant viewpoints.

Ideation Approaches

There are three major approaches to Ideation –

1. Open Ideation- This is an on-going process wherein anyone can submit any idea at any time

through Ideation platform/social network tool etcetera. This is the most viable and thoughtful

approach to Innovation because creativity can never be time-bound. While creativity can be

stimulated, it has some limitations. An idea originates from the innate creativity and curiosity of

human mind. Ideas most often originate from what an individual (or a Team) is actually working on

and, therefore, what they naturally think about or relate to work. Undoubtedly, technology and

product areas do determine creative potential, however, most of the times its sheer serendipity or

spontaneity. Ideas, that emerge spontaneously (or as a result of wishful thinking and/or organized

efforts), need to be captured at that very instance before it fades away with time. That’s why ‘Open

Ideation’ holds the key to organizational success.

2. Campaigns- These are time-bound idea aggregation events which may be generic or topic-focused.

While idea (unlike pizza ) doesn’t always arrive at a particular time, still there are various factors

that can steer such campaigns and attain great results. Some of such factors are-

a) Motivation by management

b) Emotional and Mental engagement

c) Cognitive and Social interaction between people

d) Active participation by leadership

e) Rewards and Recognition for ideas

f) Gamification

g) Purpose-driven Idea management

h) A good Ideation software platform

Campaigns allow you to focus on the areas of the business that you want to innovate in right now at

a given time. By defining a clear topic you improve idea quality, which in return increases the

probability that they actually get implemented. Campaigns by definition have a given time frame,

and sometimes target a specific audience - both of these help to focus the right amount of

corporate energy on the best possible outcomes with minimal rigor.

3. Process Driven: This is more related to product enhancement and integrated with the product or

service development lifecycle. This helps in adding value to your product thereby generating

revenue through upselling or adding new clients.

One of the most influential and significant

benefit of Ideation event, to me, is

improvement in employee satisfaction by

instilling enthusiasm through such

collaborative exercise. Not only does it keep

techies energetic but also will improve

employee retention by keeping them engaged

and giving them platform to exhibit their

technical prowess and thus quenching their

thirst for working on new ideas and

technologies.

Improvement of networking and collaboration

among employees.

Identification, development and mentoring of

the high potential employees by giving them

chance to unfurl their wings.

Establishment of a decentralized Idea

community and an Innovation process for a

long term.

Discovery of new, distinct and potentially

valuable ideas and solutions for existing

customers which could not have been

discovered otherwise.

Discovery of out-of-the-box ideas by

recognizing new customer needs that have

been non-existent so far which would

subsequently help in tapping new customers

or building up a new product altogether.

Last, but not the least, a feeling of satisfaction

among employees, management, leaders by

doing something other than the usual daily

work thus adding that aroma of newness to

work.

Ideation Benefits

Suicidal Ideation: Causes of Ideation Failure

Having got enough understanding of Ideation, time to see the challenges and issues that makes most of

the Ideation events unsuccessful or rather partially-successful.

Half-hearted approach by Leadership and Management

Ideation (or any other Innovation initiative) doesn’t work out the way many companies expect. Despite

increasing commitment, funding and organizational accountability, many companies are disappointed by

the returns they are deriving from their investments. Correspondingly, they are scaling back expectations.

Instead of the disruptive products, services, and business models that were anticipated several years ago,

many initiatives have become considerably more limited in scope. This cautious perfunctory approach to

innovation is understandable, given the relatively disappointing results. At the same time, however, it is a

potentially perilous strategy. Leaders must understand that the enterprises that restrict themselves to

incremental innovation, risk unknowingly entering a vicious cycle in which they lag ever farther behind.

One of the biggest hurdles to innovation is a conservative approach, which limits innovation to small

incremental improvements and fail to result in significant step changes and revenue opportunities. Another

major challenge is lack of systematic, enterprise-wide processes capable of commercializing inventions into

products or services at scale, bringing them to market in a sufficiently timely fashion and reaping the

expected returns.

According to Gartner’s Anthony Bradley, the vast majority of social collaboration initiatives fail due to “lack

of purpose”. Bradley suggests that the current “provide and pray” approach is underwhelming with just a

10% success rate.

Insufficient Time for Innovation

One of the biggest ideation challenges is the everlasting condition of real or perceived lack of time.

While most of the organizations consider innovation of utmost importance and initiate Ideation events,

most of the employees remain so engrossed and swamped in their project work , that only a few could get

time to think and add ideas. This shows the biggest gap between the planning and implementation of such

innovation initiatives. There is no dearth of expertise and skills for technological innovation, however, in

most of the cases, management prefers project deliveries over creative thinking and thus focus on

performance and efficiency.

Deadlines and everyday distractions take away from the time necessary for people to make creative

contributions. For example, questions such as- Do we really have time for this? or ―What’s the charge

code? can easily frustrate any initiative, be it innovative or not.

Ideas need time to breathe and people need time to soak in the problem, challenge or opportunity. This

requires some form of organizational slack, or the active facilitation of opportunities for people to spend

time thinking and connecting with others beyond the needs of their current assignment.

Organizations should propel employees to spend time for a range of ideation activities: creative thinking,

making idea contributions, collaborating with others, participating in events, reviewing contributions and so

forth. While some employees can use this time for hanging around, management should be more

concerned about those few who would utilize this time to come up with creative sensational ideas.

Mundane Environment

Creating and maintaining a collaborative environment for evolving ideas is crucial to successful ideation.

This also helps level the playing field so that ideas can compete on fair terms.

A research suggests that process (ideation), management (guidance) and intrinsic motivation all play key

roles in driving creativity and innovation in organizations. Unless you combine these forces with wishful

thinking, you would face difficulties in running ideation events.

While employees want to participate in such events, they get so engrossed in project commitments that

they enervate and develop lackadaisical attitude towards Innovation. Somewhere they have a feeling that

their performance appraisal is directly linked to fulfillment of client obligations or project responsibilities.

Lack of guidance and motivation from management is a big impediment in the success of ideation event

(or any other innovation event) unsuccessful.

Ineffective Communication

Poor definition of problems, challenges and opportunities may also render ideation efforts ineffective.

Having made contributions, most people accept the fact that their ideas may be rejected, but they would

like to know why. They would like to get feedback in a timely fashion and they would like to see that at least

some ideas, even if they are not their own, are actually acted upon. Failure in establishing Ideation point-of-

contact and ineffective communication with individuals having ideas subsequently leave a deep impact on

the participant resulting in a systemic failure of such events.

Unstructured Platform for Idea (Innovation) Management

Most of the widely-deployed Innovation platforms, used in the organisations, lack inherent capability to

transform ideas into projects. In some of the cases, ideation platforms require steep learning curve or have

set of documented procedures that make it difficult for the contributor acting as a repulsive factor.

Companies use general purpose communication platforms to crowd-source ideas while such platforms act

just like “Digital Suggestion Box” of ideas. These softwares do not have the capability and functionality to

capture entire life-cycle of an idea right from its emergence to its culmination. Without a complete

enterprise Innovation platform, companies and teams fail to derive measurable results and business value

from Ideation events.

According to a study, only 25% of organizations have gone past the use of a generic social media tool to

step up to one that has dedicated innovation capabilities built in or added on. Such general communication

tools, when used for Idea development, often “create silos of implementations, without agile frameworks for

managing change. As a result of using such technologies for innovation, companies are being forced to

manage innovation within business departments – such as IT, sales and marketing. In the absence of proper

innovation tools and a holistic approach, opportunities are lost.

Half-hearted

approach by

Leadership and

Management

Insufficient Time for

Innovation

Mundane

Environment

Ineffective

Communication

Unstructured Platform

for Idea (Innovation)

Management

Successful Ideation: Ways to bloom Ideation

Keeping all these issues into consideration, organisations need to plan ideation events, with comprehensive

set of innovation armaments to harness creativity thereby shortening the divergence between expectations

and results giving way to competitive advantage.

What can companies do to improve disappointing performance and deliver results from an ideation event?

While the answers can be exuded from the challenges discussed earlier, there are various ways to empower

such initiatives which will be discussed henceforth.

Holistic, Formal process for Ideation

Organizations, that have a holistic,

formal system in place for ideation,

consistently report better outcomes

and higher levels of satisfaction

from their innovation investment.

With a formal ideation process in

place and an organizational home

to nurture creativity, companies can

bring forth breakthrough

innovation and develop new

markets. With a complete process

in place, companies can ensure that

ideas are not just generated but

actually completed. Repeatable and

scalable innovation requires

mobilization of key factors to

achieve success: leadership,

management, process alignment

and technology.

A robust innovation management exploits the strengths of all players in one ecosystem, right from tracking

to evaluation of incoming ideas aligning them with the organization’s strategic goals thereby

commercializing the most promising ideas.

The ideation process can be greatly facilitated by designating organizational roles thus demonstrating

management support. Such roles could include ideation champion, idea campaign manager, idea

champion, ideation evangelist, jury member et al. In case of idea campaigns, review teams must be

designated in conjunction with the initiation of an idea campaign to secure the availability of time and

expertise for idea evaluation. This also acts as a motivational factor for contributors as they know that their

idea will be evaluated and will not just lurk in the database.

Define multiple idea stages to match the organization’s innovation process where each stage has its own

graduation threshold. The number of crowd votes, views, discussions and other key parameters can be

defined as thresholds to “graduate” an idea automatically from one stage to the next. This allows for

automated spotting and lifting of good ideas in the early stages of a challenge (Some good ideas can still

be left behind as this method relies on votes, views etc., however, this being a cyclic repeatable process,

good ideas would subsequently make way).

Once “not so good” ideas are screened out, review team can go back to contributors to ask relevant

questions like-

Is your great idea achievable? What’s the goal?

What’s the scope? Is there budget? Is the timing right?

How does your idea fit into the bigger business plan?

Remember: Do not ask these questions in the beginning as it would act as deterrent for contributors since it could confuse them

or overload them by the sheer magnanimity of the questions.

Gang of experts or evangelists can further sieve the ideas at later stages using high thresholds and aligning

them with business value. Reviews like marketing review, legal review and operations review can be further

done by review team once an idea reaches a stage where it is seriously being considered for

implementation.

Once the idea is being considered for implementation, you can now dig into the details to create a

schedule: list requirements, outline resources, create dependencies, develop budgets and add assignments.

A well-defined end-to-end process, of leveraging each phase and utilizing all the people in your ecosystem

in a frictionless way, can help develop transformative ideas and drive sustainable business growth.

Effective Project Management

An ideation event can never be successful unless you derive value out of the good ideas by

commercializing them and project management plays a key role in that part. To derive the most out of an

idea, a sound plan accompanied by a flawless execution is required. This can be achieved by an effective

mechanism of task assignment, progress tracking and dynamic communication. Identify bottlenecks before

they impact the timeline and ensure that milestones and deadlines are in context with each other and

aligned to project goals. To save time and effort, make sure everyone on the team can access, download,

share, and revise documents quickly and ensure people working on the project always have the latest

version using versioning tools. Consider using shared repositories or online services like Dropbox, Box,

Google Drive or SkyDrive, unless there are business reasons to avoid using these services.

Final success depends on agility, celerity, task management, alignment of dispersed cross-functional teams

and acceleration of time to market.

Rewards and Recognition

Use of rewards and recognition drive employee engagement and catalyze innovation. They aren’t just

about making employees feel good but can help propel revenue growth, boost worker productivity and

improve employee retention. With a phased approach in ideation event with different levels of filtering,

employees should be recognized for clearing various levels, even if their ideas do not produce tangible

benefits. One of the ways could be making participation in such event part of performance evaluation with

high weightage to motivate for such activities.

In cases where ideas develop into actual new products, incentives might include cash rewards similar to

those many organizations offer for patents. If an idea develops into a new business, the incentive might

take the form of stock options.

Strong Intent of Leadership

A purposeful roadmap with a determined execution path and a disciplined investment approach addressing

risk management, companies can drive high returns from innovation. A less conservative approach towards

innovation is required to disrupt market rather than betting on safer opportunities. Bigger and disruptive

innovation requires identification, measurement and management of risk.

According to Forrester, “Executives, including the CIO, must create a corporate culture that encourages

employees to contribute new ideas, solicit ideas from partners and customers, and support an embedded

innovation process. To help build and maintain an innovation culture, CIOs must work to enable a culture of

trust, acceptance of failure, flexibility, and open communications across the enterprise.”

An open approach to R&D is required, which looks beyond the enterprise for skills, know-how and expertise

to support the development process.

With that in place the entire organization stands to see iterative gains and impressive wins.

Innovation Time-Offs for Employees

If you've used a Post-it Note lately or sent a message from a Gmail account, you've been the beneficiary of

a corporate innovation program that gives employees time to be creative. Google is well known in the tech

community for its "20% time," which gives employees a day a week to follow their passions. 3M Corp. has

allotted 15% of its employees' time to innovation, which led to the creation of the now-ubiquitous yellow

sticky note, among other products.

In order to be innovative and creative, employees need time. It's energizing for employees to take a break

from their day-to-day business and think creatively about solving other problems or using technology in a

different way. Employees recognize it as something valuable.

Part of the management, who feels that it's hard to let staffers work even an occasional half-day a week

without expecting tangible results, need transformational shift in mind-set to realize the benefits of such

time-offs to foster creativity as gone are the days of carrot-and-stick form of motivation. For employees, it

can be hard to shift focus and take up something amorphous when real-world deadlines loom. Therefore,

give them a break and let them unfurl their wings and unleash their creativity.

Use of Enterprise Innovation platform

While most of the organisations have accepted the need for innovation via ideation, the majority have not

yet realized the necessity of an enterprise innovation platform to incubate and commercialize ideas. Good

innovation platform helps fostering innovation by enabling businesses to engage employees, partners and

customers at scale to find and execute transformative ideas that drive business growth. Such tools add

structure to innovation process linking idea capture and end-to-end idea management with purpose-driven

project management. They have inherent capabilities to progress ideas into projects by engaging

employees, partners, customers and leadership at one place and at the same time managing and executing

the ideas driving growth and profitability by deftly controlling the entire innovation process, from start to

finish.

They are also equipped with data analytics capabilities further helping in idea screening, for instance, they

have algorithms to correct for user voting fatigue, transitive errors and eliminate “gaming the system”.

Some of them come with advanced voting techniques like Pairwise Voting (which presents users with a

series of choices (A or B?)) that can be used to ensure that each idea is being considered carefully and also

to make sure that a breakthrough idea is not left behind to “die in the vine”. Inherent gamification

capabilities make them more lucrative.

Use of such sophisticated, yet simple, enterprise tools can help businesses to innovate faster, manage ideas

and projects more effectively, and demonstrate value that directly contributes to the bottom line.

Gamification

Gamification is the concept of applying game mechanics and game design techniques to engage and

motivate people to achieve their goals. Gamification taps into the basic desires and needs of the users

impulses which revolve around the idea of Status and Achievement.

This is being used in many innovation platforms to induce user participation and it has emerged highly

successful way to engage users by letting users have fun while solving a challenge.

For example, once the users turn in their idea submissions, they can vote on others’ ideas. The voting is in

the form of head to head battles, where points are rewarded for both participation (one point for each

vote, presumably to encourage more activity), and winning battles (two points to the user who comes up

with the better of two ideas). As users accumulate more points, their ideas float up the leaderboard. In

addition to the points earned, users are also provided with virtual currency that they can trade with each

other using ‘Idea Trading’.

Idea Trading is another great mechanism. Idea Trading encourages people to be earnest about what drives

value. They are unlikely for example, to invest their virtual currency in an idea that’s frivolous or less likely to

succeed in the market− much like stockbrokers would evaluate to stocks in the exchange. Idea Trading

allows a subset of ideas to be carefully weighed and is one predictor of an idea’s potential business impact.

Because users build rank and reputation when they earn points, they keep coming to the platform to add

new ideas or vote for other ideas to earn points and exchange virtual currency resulting in an active

increased engagement.

Holistic, Formal process for

Ideation

Effective Project Management

Strong Intent of Leadership

Rewards and Recognition

Innovation Time-Offs for

Employees

Use of Enterprise Innovation

platform

Gamification

Conclusion

Ideation is a perfect

complement to an approach

of engaging actively with

employees, partners and

customers with an objective

to position strategically and

demonstrate value. Such

initiatives give employees the

freedom to explore and the

ability to be creative, which

can improve morale and

increase work output. When

serendipity strikes, the end

result can be a product or

feature that boosts

productivity, increases

corporate revenue, or both.

Companies are realizing the

need for sustainable and

effective innovation via

crowdsourcing. The

fragmented landscape of

expectations and investments

have forced organizations to

put formal systems in place

for social engagement,

innovation management and

project management to keep

up the promise of true

enterprise innovation. They

need to organize ideation

events to unleash a

grassroots level of passion to

generate more innovative

and transformational

changes. If innovation and

creativity are not part of your

existing culture, you're not

going to infuse it in one day

and thus require a consistent

approach by organizations.

A willful stimulus from

leadership and a strong

support from management

to build a structured, scalable

and comprehensive

framework for ideation (and

other innovation exercises)

can help companies position

themselves to seize control

of change and become its

master rather than its victim.

Keep planting seeds and let

ideas germinate.