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Idea Management, like all other key management disciplines, takes the good alignment of people, process, and technology to build differentiated business competency and unlock organizational performance.

Innovation is the process to transform novel ideas and achieve their commercial value. Without innovation, companies will get stale and become irrelevant due to hyper-competition and frequent disruptions. 

Most good ideas emerge from interactions, not single individuals, they need to seed and mature. Ideas are worth nothing unless it's being executed. Therefore, communication, collaboration, and coordination are necessities for keeping idea flow and practicing good idea management disciplines.

Establish clear proof-of-concept before making investments to launch and scale up: Even if you have many innovative ideas, it doesn’t guarantee innovation success due to the possible execution gap, you need an idea to be executed. One of the real challenges to innovation management is how to accelerate idea validation and streamline innovation processes. In a business enterprise context, the mantra of "there are no bad ideas" is often used as a catalyst to encourage a flow of ideas, which leads to idea management, and take a structural approach to catalyze innovation,

If idea creation is more art than science, and then idea implementation is more science than art. Start-ups tend to be stronger at the ideation phase and getting to proof of concept. From idea generation to innovation implementation - plan, do, check, act is not the scenario made of linear steps, but an iterative continuum.

For an execution team, what is more needed is energy, enthusiasm and getting work done attitude: It could be a good idea to have an ideation team and an execution team. The ideation team and execution team have different focal points and performance evaluation criteria. For an ideation team, the need is a searchlight mind, and for an execution team, the need is laser focus attitude. From a performance perspective, the ideation team can be evaluated via their “thinking performance,” and the execution team will be assessed via the “doer performance.”

Focusing on convergent thinking helps in terms of validating or invalidating an idea and the execution of an idea. To put it another way, identification of the novel is only the beginning, the heavy lifting starts as a firm aligns resources and executes, it is the science of innovation management. 

Harness cross-functional collaboration to expediting idea execution: The organizational structure is different based on the nature of the business and the history of the company. Most companies fail at execution because they have no clear process, nor understand the linkage required to work horizontally across departments. To build a high-innovative organization, business needs to fine tune organizational structure, break down silo mentality and overly rigid organizational hierarchy. Organizations can be more effective in executing innovative ideas by relying less on silo functions, more on cross-functional collaboration and continuous improvement.

Innovation is an important component of organizational strategy, it is a unique business capability to reinvent business, but not to reinvent the wheels. Innovation execution is an integral part of a strategy-execution continuum. More organizations are looking for integrations with project and portfolio management tools to ensure the ideas go straight from platforms into specialized systems or tools to help them manage the portfolio of potential innovation initiatives, and manage the execution of each to achieve their commercial value. A highly innovative organization can leverage the robust, but not overly rigid processes for idea filtering and implementation, to improve innovation management efficiency and maturity.

Innovation is a process that can be managed, idea management is part of innovation. The capabilities of managing innovation in the organization is part of the value of innovation. Being too aggressive is just as bad as being too conservative. Idea Management, like all other key management disciplines, takes the good alignment of people, process, and technology to build differentiated business competency and unlock organizational performance.

Posted in: Creativity,Innovation