
Idea innovation management is actually a process of receiving innovative ideas from employees and customers to be able to improve the business. The thoughts or new ideas that can contribute in the overall growth of a company usually come either from customers or from employees. However, idea management is not only about receiving ideas from people. Idea innovation is actually a complete process of receiving, prioritizing, and implementing ideas.
Old Method of Idea Management:
Previously, most companies used a letter box to receive ideas from their employees. Sometimes, they asked their employees to suggest new ideas in a conference. Basically, there are some limitations in both letterbox and conference room methods to generate ideas. The methods of taking the ideas in papers and sorting them in order to set the priority are tiresome. Also, there are many employees who feel less comfortable to share their ideas in a conference due to lack of confidence or they don’t want to oppose ideas coming from their superiors. Therefore, the overall evaluation of ideas could not be possible in traditional idea management process.
Modern Idea Innovation Process:
In modern days, most companies use idea innovation management software for collecting ideas from the employees and let them follow the progress of idea through the system. By using the automated idea management tool towards the customers, companies can even use its voting functionality that lets employees to add new ideas and then let everyone vote for the ideas to see which ideas are most popular and effective to implement for the growth of entire innovation process.
Problems in Idea Management:
Idea management is not an easy process. The main issue that businesses get into is however that they are not able to find out a right strategy around it and are clueless about what to do with the ideas before starting to collect from their employees. In fact, most companies have a great intention, but managing ideas and rejecting the bad ones in the right way is not always easy as it is thought. While receiving or rejecting ideas, the innovation manager needs to consider the psychology around keeping people inspired even though their ideas are not chosen. Even, it is very common for the enterprises to collect a large number of ideas from their employees and then not have time to do anything at all about them. This is usually a good way to make people dissatisfied at work.
The Solution:
Nevertheless, the modern idea innovation software can be used most efficiently as a solution of the problems that arrive in an idea management process. By using this software, you can easily collect a large number of ideas from your employees at a time. Once the ideas are collected, you can easily evaluate and then prioritize the same on the basis of their importance and relevancy. The most important thing is to bring all ideas into idea management software to make sure that all ideas are stored for future opportunities. This is cost effective and more reliable solution as well.