This is a guest post written and submitted by Ms. Jessica Day of IdeaScale. IdeaScale is a leading Idea Management platform used by organizations to crowd-source idea collection. Jessica is a co-founder of IdeaScale, and currently serves as its Vice President of Marketing and Communications. You can follow IdeaScale on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, or their blog.
Every year at IdeaScale we ask our customers what it is that they most want to learn. It seems like a simple question, but sometimes it reveals broader innovation trends since our customers mirror a lot of innovation programs out there in the world. For example, our customers are working on innovation programs across numerous horizons: from incremental innovation to transformational ideas. Almost all of our innovators have programs that are at least one year old and 37% have a program that’s over three years old so we’re talking about seasoned innovation leaders. So it’s interesting to see where innovators most want help and new strategies for success. Here are the top four innovation learning opportunities this year.
Managing Ideas
This was one of the top voted themes and its appearance on the list makes a lot of sense considering that most of our innovators have already had success gathering ideas and now they need new tactics to start organizing, processing, and implementing ideas at scale. Some idea management tactics mean aligning around meaningful criteria that ideas will have to demonstrate or build into their proposals so that only relevant ideas make it in front of leadership. Some idea management tactics require that innovators again look to their crowd for additional information (new research, evaluations, ratings, etc). And some idea management tactics are specifically related to moderators duties (thanking participants, stewarding ideas to the next stage, matchmaking ideas with relevant leaders in the organization).
Employee Engagement Strategies
Approximately 70% of IdeaScale customers gather ideas from their global workforce. They do this not only because they get a variety of ideas that they can nurture into full-blown projects, but also because it improves the workplace to involve employee feedback in every level of the business. However, this means that you have to have a communications plan in place – one that tells people where the conversation is taking place and creates genuine dialogue and mentoring once employees start participating. This skill set is still in development for most innovators.
Determining ROI
Because innovation is still emerging as a discipline, there are no hard and fast rules for success or even knowing when you’re successful. It makes sense that our innovation metrics infographic was one of last year’s most downloaded resources, because people want to know how to measure not just the health of their program, but also the outputs of their innovation efforts. That means reviewing ideas for meaningful impact (most use a monetary value here, but some will use more intangible benefits like lessons learned or brand improvement) and then a commitment to track ideas against that impact over time.
Developing Innovation Processes
Everyone knows at least one existing innovation process, whether it’s Six Sigma, Design Thinking, or Agile, but IdeaScale customers will utilize multiple processes even within the same community – most of the time it’s a custom process that aligns to the major stakeholders, criteria, and decisions to be made. So innovators want to know how to develop processes repeatedly and automate the system as much as possible.
Those are the top four lessons that IdeaScale innovators say they want to learn about. But what skills are you prioritizing this year?