Employees are often the most powerful source of innovation within a company. They know your business, its customers, and the marketplace inside out, and are usually best-placed to find solutions to challenges and identify opportunities. The most innovative companies are the ones that capitalize on every brain in their business, and they transform their ideas into results using idea management software.
Innovative ideas lead to growth. They might lead to disruptive innovations which reshape the market or move your business into new ones, or they can bring about incremental innovations which improve your existing products, services and processes. Either way, these ideas can return significant and scalable ROI to your business.
Having an employee-led innovation program helps to build a culture of innovation across the entire organization. Inviting every person to bring their ideas to the table has an invaluable impact on employee satisfaction and engagement, and delivers real benefits to the business when those ideas are transformed into innovations … it’s a win-win!
Whether you’re searching for ideas for completely new products or services, or just looking to improve your existing offer, idea management will fuel your product and service development by tapping into your most powerful resource: your people.
If you’ve been struggling with a business challenge that you can’t quite solve, the chances are that someone in your organization might already have the answer, or can bring a fresh new perspective to the table. It’s amazing how even the most difficult challenges can be overcome by crowdsourcing solutions.
Idea management is a highly effective way of solving problems, but it can also help you to avoid them altogether. Sourcing insights from across your organization will help you to assess risks and detect future issues before they can do any damage.
The pace of change nowadays requires companies to manage innovation in a more deliberate fashion. It should be clear to every employee what the company process is for testing ideas, and taking them to scale.
An organization should have effective idea generation and development processes to create new offerings, both by generating a broad and diverse set of ideas and by converting these ideas into profitable business concepts.
58% of business leaders stated that they plan to increase their investment in innovation and R&D, because innovation acceleration is one of the most reliable and attractive routes to competitive differentiation and growth.
Too often, innovation is trapped within departments or boardrooms, and these silos can be difficult to break down.
Even with all the right processes in place, an employee-driven innovation program can fall down if employees aren’t effectively engaged and incentivized.
In many organizations it can be challenging to build a transparent, bottom-up process and secure that all-important buy-in from leadership.
Employee idea management software enables you crowdsource ideas from one of your biggest assets: your people. Giving each and every person in your organization a simple way to contribute their suggestions will lead to a consistent stream of ideas that will generate major ROI. You can set idea challenges for new products, services or processes, or for improvements to existing ones.
The best software solutions will support the full process from ideation, right through to execution. Once an employee has submitted an idea, their peers can collaborate with them to develop the idea further so that each contribution benefits from a wealth of different skillsets and perspectives. These ideas can then be evaluated, and the best ones moved through the pipeline to implementation.
Fundamentally, an idea management system allows you to support a process that involves gathering a large quantity of ideas and filtering them to identify ones that can benefit your business. This is achieved through a stage-gate workflow that demands specific activities from specific audiences at each stage, to control which ideas progress further.
Below is a summary of the typical stages that are included in an idea management software workflow. However, it’s worth noting that not all tools can support every step of this process:
To begin with, you create a ‘call for ideas’ relating to a specific challenge or issue that your company is facing. Also known as an ‘idea campaign’ or ‘idea challenge’, this is how you ask your audience to submit their ideas or solutions.
During the collaboration stage your users help to develop and filter ideas through commenting, voting, and liking functionalities. Collaboration helps to refine your ideas which makes them easier to filter and implement.
Once the collaboration phase is over, ideas can then be assessed by review committees and passed to relevant subject-matter experts for further development. Advanced idea management platforms will provide several evaluation methods such as score cards, idea tournaments, and token voting.
Once you’ve selected your winning ideas, it’s time to bring them to life and manage their rollout across the company. Some platforms even allow you to create tasks and assign ownership to relevant team members to support implementation.
Don’t just talk about innovation, make sure it happens. Nurture a culture of collaboration to gather, manage, and implement impactful ideas that deliver ongoing value for your organization.
Cultivate an innovator’s mindset amongst your audience and make sure everyone’s ideas are considered
Gather and spot ideas that can deliver incredible bottom-line results for your business
Leverage the wisdom of crowds against your toughest challenges and biggest opportunities
Gather and prioritize a pipeline of innovative ideas for sustainable business growth
We’re really happy to be using Qmarkets’ idea crowdsourcing tool to help drive innovation at the DOT. The platform is going to allow a whole new level of engagement and transparency.
Once we decided on Qmarkets, we went straight into the fast lane. Setup was very quick and we saw a very special effort from Jaron and Marthe – their support was outstanding during this time. Our employees are very happy to have the visibility to really see what’s happening with their ideas.
A single idea from the Qmarkets platform has resulted in almost $40 million of added value for the business.
Intuitiveness is the hallmark of Qmarkets’ idea management tool – we are pleasantly surprised to have not received a single support request from our end users since company-wide launch of the tool.
Innovation management takes the form of several methodologies that can be combined to form an ecosystem. Take a look at each page below to get an understanding of these core solutions and how they can help your business to be more innovative.
Idea management is the structured process of collecting, screening developing, and implementing ideas that can help your organization to be more innovative and efficient.
Continuous improvement is exactly what it sounds like – the practice of continually improving and incrementally enhancing the performance of a company’s products, processes, or services.
Innovation & technology scouting allows companies to bypass these obstacles and deliver new products, services, and solutions that can dramatically enhance their value proposition.
Trend management refers to all the activities involved in scouting for and acting upon trends to fuel an organization’s innovation efforts.
Innovation portfolio management is a term that describes the maintenance and progression of an organization’s various innovation projects.
