A Price Waterhouse Coopers Innovation Survey of the “most senior people in the Times Top 1000 companies” found that the top performing 20% of companies responding collected and turned ideas into action through “well defined idea management processes” (an Idea Management System) that seek and gather ideas and knowledge widely from customers, suppliers, employees, other industries and competitors.
Although simple in concept (we all know the simple “suggestion box”), implementing a successful and effective Idea Management System involves many complexities. Among the issues to be faced are:
- cultivating a culture of sharing and collaboration supportive of innovation in general and an Idea Management System in particular
- establishing the right kind of incentive system to encourage ongoing flow of freely given ideas from employees and customers
- establishing appropriate processes for submitting and assessing ideas
- resourcing the Idea Management System appropriately to enable review of all ideas and acting on accepted ideas
- gaining visible executive support for the importance of the program and confirming that suggestions will be followed through.
For example, take one aspect of an Idea Management System – assessing and evaluating ideas submitted for consideration.
The AMA/HRI Innovation Survey 2006 commissioned by the Human Resource Institute (HRI) and executed by the American Management Association (AMA) with 1,396 respondents, found that 68% of respondents ranked innovation in their organizations as “extremely” or “very” important today, and 86% did so when asked to look 10 years out. The percentage of those rating innovation as “extremely important” jumped from 32.5% today to 51.3% in 10 years. When asked about how successful innovation is in their organizations, however, about 15% said “not successful at all” and 70% said “moderately successful.”
Of the respondents, there was no consistent view around best practices and organisational structures for evaluating and assessing ideas once they were generated. 47.6% of respondents stated that they had “no standard policy for reviewing and evaluating ideas.” 16.5% had an independent review and evaluation process for ideas, 15.4% had ideas evaluated by the unit manager where ideas were proposed, 12.6% had the ideas evaluated by the unit that had the ideas, and 7.6% had the employee making the suggestion responsible for starting and managing the review process.
Each of these approaches may have their merits and be appropriate in particular contexts. The survey, however, serves to underscore the point that for an effective Ideas Management System, an organisation needs to have in place first an effective Ideas Management Architecture describing how ideas are submitted and processed, to implement appropriate business processes for submitting and evaluating ideas, to resource the initiative effectively, to implement it with visible executive support, and to monitor it on an ongoing basis for performance against corporate goals.
Implementing an Ideas Management System in a complex modern organisation is not typically as simple as just opening a suggestions box – alhough that may be a good start.