We have been working with innovation related projects for many years now – and observed many different approaches work. This creates a challenge in that “innovation practices” are still emerging. The approaches followed are almost as diverse as the number of books published on the subject. There are however a number of common things that need to be looked at; some of these include:
- focus on understanding your approach first
- commit to the approach and work on embedding it into your culture
- get people energized to apply the newly acquired knowledge
- let ideas emerge (similarly to the way you’ve always done it)
- work on one change at a time and move forward from there
- reward successes and ensure that company measures are not undermined
- make it a long-term journey…

Based on some of these heuristics, innovation software products should contain some(or all) of these features as a minimum:

Manage ideation, innovation and adoption cycles:
- create observations (general learnings, market scans, landscaping)
- create ideas (as result of individual genius, workshopping, creative sessions, etc)
- create innovations (as result of reviewing ideas, etc)
- create projects (decide to spend money on realizing the ideas/innovations)

Staged idea/innovation capture:
- basic idea recording mechanisms (to simplify the process)
- deadlines, and other time based information
- investment needed and other monetary related information
- process and staged based information collection (especially for clients with stage-gate based approaches)

Project management integration:
- realize ideas through creating projects from the selected ideas

Setting of challenges and prizes:
- set a challenge on an idea with deadline, prize, and intended outcome

Define innovation campaigns based on strategic initiatives:
- define innovation campaigns based on context setting approaches
- target innovators to participate
- set challenges
- reward winners and achievers

Invite specialists:
- invite specialists to assist with developing your ideas (maybe through tribes?)
- create “call for review” notifications to elicit feedback
- create innovation workshops with directed purpose statements to facilitate specialized input

Define key measures for dashboarding:
- have the basic measures on dashboard depending on your position in the org structure or social network
- produce an automated innovation portfolio based on key measures
- have “socially aware” ideas move to the top automatically
- have “socially inept” ideas move sideways into “please review”

Integrate with NPD (new product development):
- define product and service targets (which to get ideas for)
- have idea approval and grouping by version/release/platform numbers for products
- integrate with legal process especially for trade marks, patents, copyrights, company secrets

Idea value analysis:
- group ideas by external and internal related criteria
- value the market potential of ideas for external use
- value ideas based on cost saving etc for internal use
- define portfolio balancing criteria

Knowledge management platform:
- integrate patent portfolio and other legal innovation constructs
- integrate field knowledge acquired throughout field testing and trials
- get information from various sources through mash-ups
- flag ideas as “company secrets” or secret ideas
- initiate prototypes, etc

Idea evaluation analysis:
- ideas that are discovered and copied
- entirely new ideas
- science based processes, etc

Idea and innovation clustering:
- search for like ideas and relate together with reason code
- allow idea consolidation

Idea and innovation workshop manager:
- define workshop purpose and objectives
- collect many ideas; but don;t “commit” to them
- review the collected ideas and produce an approved set
- measure effectiveness of session
- get participants involved electronically by viewing ideas on-line in real-time
- map ideas onto the Opportunity/Capability or other innovation models

Innovation e-learning integration:
- get access to all basic innovation terminology
- allow for brief learning sessions before ideas are captured
- track learning on the dashboard

Innovation tracking and energizing:
- track and monitor innovation “energy”
- understand who are creating ideas and at what pace
- automatically generate “innovation stimulation” activity for eg. e-mails, SMS’s etc

Community:
- structural and social based community collaboration to be allowed
- allow customers to see certain ideas and capture their own
- allow certain external intellectual and other providers to participate in the innovation process
- allow your legal firm access to key legal challenges

This is by no means a complete list of the features needed to manage automated idea management approaches in organziations, but it provides some insight into some of the important features. The simpler the approach the more effective the adoption will be.

Have a look at www.ReframingBusiness.com.