Making Ideation a Competitive Strength

Photo by Diego PH on Unsplash

Photo by Diego PH on Unsplash

Ideation is evolving as a category as more and more organizations seek to tap into the collective wisdom of their employees. Ideation, or Idea Management, is a process whereby an organization can inspire creativity, capture it, create a plan, and take action. It can (or should) play an important role within your digital transformation strategy by allowing employees to drive the innovation process. As I always say, the more you involve people in the process the more likely they will support the outcome of the process.

This is not so much a blog post as an outline supporting the concept of Ideation, and how to support it within the enterprise:

Its about surfacing ideas from your employees that may otherwise be lost within the daily tasks, with no way of being shared with peers and management

  • Cross-functional
  • Opens up dialog across all employees
  • Allows people to provide feedback from their unique perspectives, making the overall solution more robust, grounded

Method for moving an idea through a formal review process, or project to where action can be taken – and innovation measured

  • Reduced costs
  • Improved customer experience
  • New product introduction
  • Improved internal systems and processes

Within most organizations, idea management more about aligning with their internal processes

  • Employees submit ideas
  • Employees vote on best ideas
  • After review by management, the best ideas are promoted to projects
  • Employees with winning ideas get recognition or rewards

One problem with ideation is that it is usually disconnected from the rest of the collaboration platform — seen as a standalone activity

  • Can lead to lost information
  • Ideas could be out of context to historical projects or information
  • If outside of normal tools and systems, could be a loss of productivity, or even adoption
  • Discovery can be difficult
  • Studies have shown that people are more likely to respond if others are already discussing — so the more activity, the more likely others are to join in the discussion

When linked to social tools within the enterprise, it becomes a natural fit for employee dialog and can be better linked to knowledge management activities and collected knowledge

  • Product team or business unit-led initiatives
  • Monthly challenges
  • Incorporate it into the new product introduction (NPI) process
  • Community-led

Creating a more intelligent “digital workplace” means better incorporating the tools employees use to communicate in ways that also benefit the business

  • A more natural fit for the way teams work together
  • Pick up on tacit knowledge otherwise lost by most systems
  • Needs to continually evolve

Christian Buckley

Christian is a Microsoft Regional Director and M365 Apps & Services MVP, and an award-winning product marketer and technology evangelist, based in Silicon Slopes (Lehi), Utah. He is a startup advisor and investor, and an independent consultant providing fractional marketing and channel development services for Microsoft partners. He hosts the weekly #CollabTalk Podcast, weekly #ProjectFailureFiles series, monthly Guardians of M365 Governance (#GoM365gov) series, and the Microsoft 365 Ask-Me-Anything (#M365AMA) series.