Community Forum – Tell us about your motivation for ideation

Our organization is evaluating how much time is spent on ideating as well as what are motivational drivers to ideate.  See results below:

4. What are key drivers that motivate you to ideate?

• Opportunities to develop new products, file IP, meet organizational objectives
• Passion to make the world a better place.
• The best ideas come in co-creation.
• Ideas for the innovation pipeline, solving problems with innovation projects. Brainstorming with customers or suppliers.
• Curiosity
• Customer/market needs; business goals; previous work identifying gaps.
• Customer gaps
• Desire of senior leadership to “move into the future”.
• Restless discontent.
• Key continuous improvement opportunities.  Understandings of gaps in our offerings.
• Improve the company. Making something useful happen.
• Solutions to real-life problems customers are experiencing.
• Product innovation, Process and efficiency improvements.
• Creating a positive impact with new results.
• Keeping pipeline of new products and technologies robust and full.
• We first decide that we want to invest X amount of money to address problem Y, then hold ideation sessions Z to feed the new project. Project blocking points may also trigger ideation sessions.

5. Shifting gears, we want to know about your documentation process as you ideate.  Specifically regarding the agile development process, how do you capture knowledge?

• Manual process into Excel,
• Mural, most recently, before that ppt/image capture.
• It depends. Ideas are generated in so many ways and for so many purposes that it cannot be generalized.
• We use a brainstorming software – ThinkTank that automates reporting. But the report remains with the team and is not put in a central repository.
• No specific process
• Internal SharePoint Online portal for logging & tracking disclosures.
• Ideation “knowledge briefs”
• Surveys & brainstorming into spreadsheets then into project charters.  Project charter and distilled survey results are preserved on cloud drive for technology program team.
• O365 Teams, SharePoint, PowerBI, PowerApps.
• Hand written notes. Email. Project outlines. Monthly reports.
• We utilize idea sheets to document new ideas.
• In a PowerPoint on a SharePoint. Also use OneNote. Mostly OneNote.
• We only capture potential patents.
• Stage gate process is used to manage portfolio of R&D projects, so learning gathered during development are typically captured and shared with stakeholders. Need to do a better job distributing leaning to broader organization, potentially by creating a centralized and broadly accessible (within company) repository of knowledge. This is very important for failures especially.
• Our internal project management system.
• Up to project manager.

6. Do you also document failures, roadblocks, or show stoppers?  If yes, please describe.

• A rating/ranking process might capture some aspects of hurdles, but it is more for prioritizing what ideas provide higher probability of success, fit and better choice.
• It depends, but generally failures are documented less often.
• Yes. All projects have a close out meeting.
• Within projects, but not shared unless a presentation is given.
• No formal document.
• In some cases; by summarizing discussions with a path forward (active/inactive/shelve).
• Monthly ideation reports summarize results vs. hypothesis and presented to ideation board.
• Archived programs have a trigger for re-evaluation.
• All results are documented. They speak for themselves in most instances. Monthly reports document any major project developments. Minor deviations and early project kills are in emails.
• Yes through stage gate process, but not doing a very good job on putting failures on repository for whole organization to be aware of it.
• Some, but likely not enough.
• Our internal project management system.
• A database of internal reports is used to document these.
• No / Not really:  4 responses

Relevant IRI resources:  

· PILOT – Ideation to H2 Opportunity Portfolio (The iHOPe Project)

· How do you encourage company wide innovation?

· Employee Innovation Using Ideation Contests: Seven-Step Process to Align Strategic Challenges with the Innovation Process