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.
