In my presentation at the recent CIMdata NA Market & Industry Forum, I talked about why PLM has to extend to strategy and Front End Innovation (FEI) to become a platform for innovation. In this blog, I would like to talk about a key aspect of FEI: Ideation and Idea Management.
When we experience an innovative product or service we love, often we can see the simple “Idea” behind it. This simple idea, however, is not obvious to many of us without the actual experience. These two elements, “simple but non-obvious” constitute the very definition of a “BIG” idea. At the creation stage, such an idea should address a real need and also be actionable, i.e., it should not need the next breakthrough in science to make it happen.
Do you ever wonder how these ideas come about in the first place?
Many believe and attribute BIG ideas to Eureka moments of “geniuses.” While this may be true in rare cases, often BIG ideas are a result of disciplined practices that facilitate connecting many ideas and diverse minds. People who have studied this topic deeply have identified a handful best practices and lessons learned which I will touch on in this blog.
Best Practice 1: Visible Management Support
Management must visibly show support for new idea creation by providing resources for it, and by engaging in decision making. Management should also encourage the right learning culture, e.g., risk taking, experimenting, and learning from failure. These cultural elements are especially important to nurture among the FEI teams.
Best Practice 2: The Idea Management Core Team
Ensure that the team has the right mix of creative and divergent, and analytical and convergent talent. Pay attention also to educational, functional, and experience diversity. The core team’s responsibility is to orchestrate the ideation processes and make recommendations for the next stage evaluation of select ideas.
Best Practice 3: Adopt Practices that Encompass the Lessons Learned
Lesson 1 - Better Need (or Problem) Definition Leads to Better Ideas: The quote “A problem well put is half solved” by John Dewey is very relevant to creating BIG ideas. In reality, people have a tendency to jump into problem solving by assuming they know the problem. Recognizing this, the core team should be disciplined to invest time and effort researching, collecting information from diverse sources, and engaging key stake holders on key insights to ensure that the need definition is indeed the right one for the business and aligned with the strategy. The team should assess;
- The kind of innovation that is being desired: Improvement to the current platforms? Or, creating new platforms?
- Understand the consumer, technology, and business trends
- Understand the current offerings in the market place: Who are the providers, and what is their IP? What is missing?
The team should mine the information and data for key insights, and where needed, initiate new research to refine their insights or generate new ones. Capturing these insights visually to tell a story, e.g., the desired consumer experience and current frustrations, helps diffuse learnings across the organization and create new connections and ideas across seams.
Lesson 2 - Quantity Leads to Quality, Generate Lots of Ideas: The more the ideas the better your chances to find good ideas. Therefore, “ideation” should not live in its own silo. As a principle make your existing idea spaces searchable to inspire new connections. Do not limit ideation to your core team, or to your organization’s members only. Innovate at the seams by inviting ideas from diverse sources. If you have an Open Innovation department, work with them to bring external in, or run crowdsourcing campaigns with employees and partners who are not normally included in your ideation. In one experiment with crowdsourcing at P&G, seven out of top ten ideas came from people who were not normally invited to ideation such as manufacturing, sales, and marketing agencies.
At this stage do not be critical of ideas, but rather make sure that they are clearly articulated. Similar ideas should be combined so there is less redundancy. Some of the modern ideation solutions provide sophisticated correlation and search engines to point to similar ideas as well as tools to link them.
Lesson 3 - A Criteria Based Evaluation Leads to Better Selections: The core team, partnering with the management team, should align on an evaluation criteria upfront to aid in selection of the ideas that will be recommended for further evaluation and scaling. The criteria and approach should be practical for quick assessment, for example, the core team members can judge each idea in regards to novelty, alignment with strategy, and execution complexity on a five point scale.
Those ideas where there are distinct differences of opinion should be discussed carefully since these ideas could point to breakthroughs. Where possible, compelling ideas should be brought to life using visualization and rapid (low resolution) prototyping, and tested quickly with potential consumers to understand their appeal and to improve them.
Lesson 4. Keep People who Provided Ideas Informed and Engaged: In a 2010 survey with external partners the response time to idea submissions was found to be a critical factor for submitters’ assessment of P&G as a preferred partner. Subsequently, P&G added "response time" as one of the success metrics for their Connect & Develop program. The people who have participated and shared ideas with you deserve to be kept informed of the status of their ideas. Keep them engaged by providing brief status updates.
Best Practice 4: Store Ideas in a Searchable Database for Future Reference
Do you ever feel like you are churning the same old ideas over and over again? Maybe you do. How do you know? Store ideas in a searchable database and tagged them with the team’s assessment. Transferring the knowledge of why an idea did not go forward in the past may help reevaluate the idea again more efficiently and objectively under new circumstances. Open this database to other people in the organization so that they can search and identify potential connections, add new insights and build on others’ ideas (however, remember Lesson 4).
A disciplined approach to idea generation based on best practices and lessons learned will likely increase your chances of catching the next BIG idea… If you have not already, start your journey today…
Look forward to your comments and questions.
Suna Polat
Plan to join Suna for a complimentary webinar on "Innovation in the Digital Age." Get more information here.
