Don’t let good ideas go to waste!

Your business future depends on innovations that give you the edge over your competitors. Having good processes in place to gather, evaluate and then commit the resources to implementing the ideas is vital.

Businesses can face many common obstacles in implementing a good, workable system of idea management. Learning from others’ mistakes means you don’t have to waste time making the same mistakes. So here are four common obstacles businesses face in idea management and ways to avoid them in your business.

Obstacle 1 – Time Restrictions For Discussions and Brainstorming Meetings

Time is often the greatest resource that a company has, and sometimes it is the easiest resource to waste. Not many businesses can afford to invest unlimited time into investigating new ideas, so there will always be some time limits you need to impose.

The problem is that many discussions and brainstorming meetings are cut short, before the good ideas are matured or have even surfaced. Sometimes someone’s ideas can triggers another thought in someone else a few days later. You need to allow time for ideas to mature (or to be built on by others). Sometimes this cannot happen in just one meeting.

While you need to limit some meetings, do not assume you can totally evaluate many ideas in a very short period of time. You may like to encourage ‘electronic’ meetings or emails to promote discussions after the initial brainstorming meeting for a couple of weeks.

This will allow time for great ideas to be thoroughly explored, without having to waste too much time in full meetings. Also, people can respond to emails when they have time, without having to schedule in meetings. You can also hold a briefer meeting to pull the final ideas together and to evaluate them.

Obstacle 2 – Employee Reluctance to Speak Out In Front Of Others

Sometimes companies try to hold brainstorming sessions that end up with only a few people contributing their ideas and the rest sitting back and saying nothing. Why do people do this? A common reason is that they may be reluctant to speak out in front of the group, especially if their immediate supervisor is present, and they know this person has already vetoed their idea.

You need to combat the fear of reprisals, which may prevent some employees from speaking out. Consider the team and the group you have meeting in a brainstorming session. How big the group is often important. Some people will never feel comfortable speaking out in a large group, and so you could miss out on their ideas. Try smaller group sessions or utilising more informal ways of communicating with your staff.

Obstacle 3 – People Not Believing Their Ideas Will Be Considered

If employees feel that their ideas will not be really listened to or fully considered, they will be reluctant to put them forward. The easiest way around this is a clear and visible process where ideas are formally considered. Giving feedback to staff who do put forward their ideas, even if the idea is not going forward to the implementation stage, can be essential in continuing to encourage good ideas in the future.

People do not mind if their idea was evaluated and rejected for good reasons. They just hate their ideas going off into the great big “management” void and never hearing about them again. Make your evaluation results available to staff, and you may find ideas that were once rejected are revised to suit the business needs better. You will also continue to encourage great ideas in the future.

Lack of management interest in the process will also effectively ‘kill’ innovation in your business. Appreciation and recognition of great innovative ideas will be key motivators to ensuring your business finds the creative solutions it needs.

Obstacle 4 – Lack of Ways to Build and Mature Ideas

Sometimes a simple brainstorm session is not nearly long enough for creative solutions to be found. Many great ideas have been ‘lost’ because companies did not have enough time to work through the implementation phases properly.

Good evaluation and implementation processes will allow resources for considering the pros and cons of each idea, allowing some ideas to be built on and matured further, and some ideas even modeled or trialed before full implementation is even considered.

This way, you can allow good ideas to be modified, or revised by input from others until it becomes a great idea and gives your business the innovative competitive edge it was looking for.

Investing time and resources into the processes of idea management, may mean that you will spend some money on ideas that do not work, but will eventually have better planned, and well-thought out ideas that lead to true innovations.

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If you want your business to become a leader in providing creative and innovative solutions, you’ll need ways to gather creative and innovative ideas. One of the best sources of new ideas for any business is their employees.

After all, your employees know your business the best and know the people, customers, equipment and current processes. They may have some great ideas to streamline processes to make things more efficient or may have ideas about other products your customers want.

One thing many managers struggle with is how to encourage their employees to put forward their ideas. There are several tools you can use to help you gather ideas such as suggestion boxes (or modern day equivalents using computer programs), competitions for the best creative solution to a current problem the business is facing, and creating ‘innovation teams or committees’.

Suggestion Boxes

While the ’suggestion box’ where employees would ‘post’ slips of paper with their ideas is somewhat outdated, several companies are now offering computer programs that provide ‘idea management’ and provide easy to use tools for your employees to submit their ideas.

The main problem with the suggestion box is that the ideas may be gathered but the employees receive no response to their ideas. It can be impersonal, not allowing the person to express their ideas verbally or to explain any parts of the ideas that need clarification.

If the employee doesn’t present their idea well in this impersonal format, it may well be ignored, even if it was a great idea in the first place. Also, the suggestion box often became the method of complaining about situations, rather than coming up with creative solutions to solve the problems.

If you use a suggestion box, in any way or format, you need to ensure that employees receive responses and rewards for submitting ideas, and that you have some method of getting clarification on their ideas before they are rejected. People are less likely to submit their ideas if they think it will just go into the ‘void’ of ‘computer space’.

Competitions

Many companies have decided that holding competitions among employees for providing ideas to solve particular issues or problems works well. The competition must have a prize or reward that the employees want. Recognition for their ideas, plus some monetary or prize reward will often encourage employees to submit their ideas.

You are more likely to gather ideas that will work to solve your particular issue but may not receive ‘brainwave ideas’ about other issues. I’ve seen the competition style work very well in the short-term but over a longer period, employees start losing their enthusiasm, especially once all the ‘easy’ solutions have already been submitted.

Competitions are limited then to specific issues or even themes (like how can we make our business safer during a ’safety week’ promotion) and for a short term. They might help to gather ideas but again, unless you have a tools to evaluate and decide which ideas to follow up on, you may end up losing the ideas.

If employees enter a competition and provide their ideas for one issue, and then see no new innovation or solution to the issue being implemented, they are not very likely to put forward ideas for the next competition.

Innovation Teams or Committees

Some companies have tried to put together teams or committees to help them both gather and evaluate creative ideas. The committee may have one or two representatives from each department for example and meet once a month to discuss ideas they have gathered in the meantime.

This is one way that reduces the employee feeling like they are ‘talking into the great void’ because it provides people they can go and have a chat to about their ideas. This process also shares the ideas around a number of people and what may not exactly work in one department, may be a great idea that can be adapted for use by another department.

These types of committees can work well, providing the meetings have clear agendas and are attended by people in roles that have the authority to make decisions to implement the ideas. If you only have members who don’t have any authority and can make those decisions, your employees will again face the frustration of putting forward their ideas but having nothing happen and no actions taking place.

You need to choose the committee members or innovation team members well, to ensure the meeting do not end up being a ‘talk fest’ where nothing is really achieved.

And finally..

Whatever tool you use to gather and evaluate ideas and creative solutions, you will need to ensure employees see some results, otherwise they will stop putting forward their ideas. Even if their idea is not accepted for implementation, employees should be recognised and encouraged for putting forward their ideas in the first place.

Remember that actions speak louder than words and seeing a good idea being implemented will certainly encourage all your employees to put forward their other ideas.

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Your business needs to develop a new product, continuously improve current processes or procedures or needs a creative solution to a problem. You need some creative ideas to be generated.

Brainstorming is one technique, which if used correctly, will really help you to generate the creative and innovative ideas you are looking for. The problem is that many people use brainstorming as a term too loosely and many do not have a clear idea of how to use it as a tool to their business advantage.

Brainstorming really means to create a ‘storm’ of activity in the brain to access the creative ingenuity of the people participating in the brainstorm. The concept is relatively simple, and there are minimal resource costs to running effective brainstorm sessions.

However, as an idea generation technique, you need to know what you are doing with brainstorming activities, otherwise you may find that the ideas are either not put forward at all, or there is no action that results from the session. Either way, the brainstorm session could be deemed a waste of time by management.

Brainstorming is often ineffective because the people who run the brainstorming sessions do not follow some simple rules. This guide will give you the rules and ensure your brainstorming sessions do not end up being a colossal waste of time.

The guide book “Brainstorming Made Simple” is a great tool that will help you to get the most out of your brainstorming sessions. Whatever your core business is, brainstorming can help. Brainstorm sessions can help to focus the idea generation which happens in your business all the time. Brainstorming activities can help your business to ‘harvest’ or gather the ideas your employees have.

Start with “Brainstorming Made Simple” and learn the best techniques to make your brainstorming sessions truly effective. Learn the rules of brainstorming, and avoid the common mistakes that are made. Learn how to brainstorm on your own, one on one and how to effectively use the technique in a small group.

We have put together a short video which briefly explains seven key skills to make you a great facilitator. Even if you’re not a facilitator it will show you how to tell the difference when you next need to choose a facilitator for your workshop or meeting

You’ve taken the first steps towards becoming known as an innovative business. You have gathered many creative ideas from customers and from employees. However, now you need to do some weeding and find a way work out which creative solutions will lead your business into the future.

What you need are simple evaluation tools to help you decide which ideas to discard and which to follow up on. You need ideas that have synergy with your business in its aims, values and direction.

Evaluation tools to best fit your business

There are a number of ready made idea evaluation tools available on the market. You may need to consider adapting these to match the specific needs of your business. This is because your business will most likely have different criteria against which you want to evaluate all your ideas.

You may also want to consider creating a simple idea evaluation tool that can be adapted to suit ideas gathered to solve particular problems.

So what should an idea evaluation tool do? Most importantly it should give you the criteria to judge all ideas against. This will help you to decide the ideas to follow up on and which ones to discard, at least in the short term.

Innovative Companies Discard Dud Ideas Early

Because your business may have limited resources, or even if you don’t, there’s no real benefit in spending too much time and money in following up or exploring ideas unsuitable to your business needs. You can’t afford to ‘trial’ every single idea that arrives on your desk!

Ideally your idea evaluation tool should have several steps in the process, which will allows you to discard some ideas straight away, take only a few ideas on to a ‘trial’ phase and then decide on the best idea to implement completely. This means you won’t be wasting time and resources in trialling every single idea.

Innovative businesses will work to evaluate and decide on which idea keep or discard reasonably early on in the process. This is important, because unless you discard some ideas, you’ll stretch your limited resources too thin and then won’t be able to properly resource the implementation of the best idea.

Questions Idea Evaluation Tools Should Answer

The following questions can help you decide which evaluation tool to use and what your evaluation tool should achieve. Ask yourself:

• What is the ‘problem’ we want to solve. All great innovations come from creative ideas to solve particular problems. Liquid paper was invented by a secretary who wanted to solve the problem of making typing errors, for example. Your idea evaluation tool should always start with the ‘problem’ and give each idea a rating on how well they solve the problem.
• What are the benefits of this idea? The benefits of each idea may be different, but a good evaluation tool will enable benefits to be listed and even given a rating on how much of a benefit it will bring to the company. * What are the disadvantages of this idea? Some ideas will have obvious disadvantages that will enable you to decide to discard them quickly. Other ideas may seem great until you trial them and discover the disadvantages

• What resources will be needed before we can fully implement this idea? This question helps businesses decide what ideas are cost-effective to implement and may prevent the business from spending too much on an idea that is too expensive to start up. If the idea needs a complete change to all the manufacturing equipment you currently have, it may not be worthwhile following up. If however, you can implement the idea with only a few minor modifications to existing equipment, it may well be worth trialling.

• Does this idea ‘fit’ our business? The idea has to fit within the image, values and mission of the business. Otherwise, it may take the business in a whole new direction. Sometimes ideas are so good, businesses are willing to move into that new direction. However, most ideas that do not ‘fit’ the company will be more costly to implement because new equipment, procedures and people may have to be involved in the implementation of the idea.

Good idea evaluation tools will enable your business to make the step from idea to implementation without spending too much time and resources on the ‘bad’ ideas. Find the best creative solutions to your business problem with great idea evaluation tools and good idea management.

Stop losing your great ideas by using idea management processes in your business.

What is idea management? Although it’s a relatively new ‘concept’ in business management theory, put simply, it’s about how new ideas for a business are translated into actions, new products or processes.

I know businesses have been using new ideas, creating new products and finding new ways to do what they do for many years, so why the big fuss about idea management? The real answer is many businesses have been slow to act on any new ideas and end up not going anywhere. They mark time, not moving from the same spot while everyone around them continue moving forward.

How do you move forward?

When you start a business you’re fully involved in the creative processes. You’re involved in designing the business, how it works, how people work within it. As the business grows, more people come on board and consequently become involved in its future. This can mean two things.

Firstly, you have access to more business creativity and ideas than you had before. Each new person has the potential to you ideas to change the future of the business, possibly even its direction.

Secondly, there is more likelihood of ideas getting ‘lost in the mix’ and never being considered or implemented.

Idea management helps you manage the innovation process

As I mentioned earlier, as your business grows you have access to more ideas. Ideas with the potential to help your business continue to grow and make bigger profits.

The difficulty though is in both gathering and having processes in place to act on these great new ideas.

Idea management aims to help you

* gather ideas for your business,
* evaluate and discard some, and
* work on implementing the worthwhile ones.

Gathering ideas in the first place can be difficult.

It’s not easy to get people to come forward with those potential business changing creative ideas. You also need to be able to get suggestions from all different sources, for example, employees and customers.

One of the most common ways of gathering ideas is to place a ’suggestion box’ in a prominent position asking for ideas. Unfortunately suggestion boxes don’t work as well any more. They may at first, especially if it was started with great fanfare and a competition with a prize for the best new idea. But over time ideas slow down to a trickle and then nothing at all. Back to square one.

So why don’t they work? Mostly because they they focus on only one part of the problem - they help to garner new ideas for your business but they do nothing to react, evaluate or implement them.

Often businesses gather these great ideas from the suggestion box, but didn’t have the means or the processes in place to evaluate or implement the best ideas. Meanwhile, employees and customers felt frustration at having no response about their idea and eventually the suggestion box would stay empty.

But you still need some ways of gathering ideas, both from employees and your current customers. Giving staff (and customer) recognition and rewards for ideas is often a good way to encourage a continual flow of great ideas.

Surveys from both employees and customers is another way of addressing any problems and also gaining new ideas that can be implemented. Some businesses have changed the physical suggestion box into an electronic format where people can ‘post’ their ideas.

You need to make sure, though, people are listened to when they present an idea, even if you don’t think it’s very good or suitable to your business needs or problems. Sometimes one idea can lead to another and a winner idea is the result!

Whichever way you gather the new ideas for your business, idea management is a very effective way of gathering, capturing and evaluating that next big idea which will propel your business ahead of your competitors.