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An ideas bank is a widely available shared resource, usually a website, where people post, exchange, discuss, and polish new ideas. Some ideas banks are used to develop new inventions or technologies. Many corporations have installed internal ideas banks to gather the input from their employees and improve their ideation process. Some ideas banks employ a voting system to estimate an idea's value. In some cases, ideas banks can be more humor-oriented than their serious counterparts. The underlying theory of an ideas bank is that if a large group of people collaborate on a project or the development of an idea that eventually said project or idea will reach perfection in the eyes of those who worked on it.[ citation needed ] [1]
Many ideas banks are provided as free of charge, or set around certain companies in general to work out new inventions. [2] Although ideas are provided by a community of people, problems can arise when people take the ideas from the site and begin developing them. [3] There is no possible way to prove that the idea on the ideas bank was original and not taken from something else.
The front end of innovation is quite distinct from the remainder of the innovation process. When the very best ideas are discovered, they can be managed with a stage gate oriented project management system, where the work flow is defined. The front end of innovation is commonly referred to as "fuzzy" because it functions best when a collaborative system nurtures chaos, disruption and the serendipitous discovery of ideas. Most ideas submitted via an electronic suggestion box are limited to incremental innovation (doing things the way we always have but better). There is nothing wrong with incremental innovation, in fact the ideas leading to projects resulting from incremental innovation typically yield rapid revenue gains or cost savings. But most organizations are using collaborative idea management systems to get breakthrough or radical innovation (ideas that can be thought of as "out of the box" thinking").
The fuzzy front end of innovation benefits by having a collaborative tool serving as a backbone to nurture an organization's culture of innovation. Everyone can log into this system, post objects of interest to the other users, search for information, comment on information, discover experts in the organization when needed and as a result everyone is more well informed. In this sense the collaborative tool serves as a knowledge management system and is very Facebook-like, except everyone is talking about work. Of course the collaborative tool also accepts the submission of ideas. The idea management software solution manages these ideas by allowing others to comment on them, shaping the idea further, clustering them with similar ideas (utilizing the idea management software's similarity search capabilities) and accepting some sort of voting scheme in order to score the idea's worth. Better idea management software systems will use an algorithm to measure the "wisdom of the crowd" gauging social media type activity. In this instance that means the best ideas are automatically promoted when they get a combination of the most votes, the comments, the most votes on comments, the most views, the most "follows", the most "alerts", the most bookmarks and the most similar ideas posted...all combined in a mathematical formula to determine which idea is best as measured by the group of collaborators working on ideas.
Unsolicited ideas typically lead to incremental innovation.[ citation needed ] To get to radical or breakthrough innovation, the idea management system needs to indulge in some strategic guidance by issuing challenges (or campaigns or seeding). In essence the bottom up grown organizational engagement of a collaborative idea management system is managed a little bit by some top down strategic guidance. The company is saying "We're glad you're all talking together, now do us a favor and talk about this...". They ask for ideas to address the big issues of the company, for instance "How do we make the company more 'green'". "What should our next new product be in the US"? This approach is often known as a corporate innovation programme.[ citation needed ]
By collaborating, companies can assemble all the smart people in the company to exchange ideas, enhance each other's ideas and have the best ideas be automatically promoted (and you need an automated promotion mechanism in the software because the problem isn't that you won't get enough ideas, the problem is you'll get too many and you don't want someone to have to manually filter through them all).
While idea management led to the installment of corporate social platforms for communication, research shows that focus must be put on the idea communication process. Good ideas need collegial elaboration and motivation, while resources should not be spent on ideas that are not applicable. Idea screening is an activity that will use the idea management platforms to fulful this taslk. Idea screening is an activity that consists of perception (the process of making sense and becoming aware) and judgement (reaching conclusions about what has been perceived). Given that organizations have limited resources, and cannot implement all of the ideas, idea screening acts as a bottleneck during the innovation process. [4] Thus far, research studies have mainly focused on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of idea screening through e.g. crowdsourcing, improving its accuracy, and even developing algorithms that mimic human evaluations. However, this pursuit of technical and procedural optimization has only reinforced the perception of idea screening as a strict decision gate, limiting our understanding of the human side of this phenomenon.
Collaborative software or groupware is application software designed to help people working on a common task to attain their goals. One of the earliest definitions of groupware is "intentional group processes plus software to support them."
Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services. ISO TC 279 in the standard ISO 56000:2020 defines innovation as "a new or changed entity, realizing or redistributing value". Others have different definitions; a common element in the definitions is a focus on newness, improvement, and spread of ideas or technologies.
Iterative and incremental development is any combination of both iterative design and incremental build model for development.
In business and engineering, product development or new product development covers the complete process of bringing a new product to market, renewing an existing product and introducing a product in a new market. A central aspect of NPD is product design, along with various business considerations. New product development is described broadly as the transformation of a market opportunity into a product available for sale. The products developed by an organisation provide the means for it to generate income. For many technology-intensive firms their approach is based on exploiting technological innovation in a rapidly changing market.
A management information system (MIS) is an information system used for decision-making, and for the coordination, control, analysis, and visualization of information in an organization. The study of the management information systems involves people, processes and technology in an organizational context. In other words, it serves, as the functions of controlling, planning, decision making in the management level setting.
Brainstorming is a creativity technique in which a group of people interact to suggest ideas spontaneously in response to a prompt. Stress is typically placed on the volume and variety of ideas, including ideas that may seem outlandish or "off-the-wall". Ideas are noted down during the activity, but not assessed or critiqued until later. The absence of criticism and assessment is intended to avoid inhibiting participants in their idea production. The term was popularized by advertising executive Alex Faickney Osborn in the classic work Applied Imagination (1953).
Social computing is an area of computer science that is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems. It is based on creating or recreating social conventions and social contexts through the use of software and technology. Thus, blogs, email, instant messaging, social network services, wikis, social bookmarking and other instances of what is often called social software illustrate ideas from social computing.
Enterprise content management (ECM) extends the concept of content management by adding a timeline for each content item and, possibly, enforcing processes for its creation, approval, and distribution. Systems using ECM generally provide a secure repository for managed items, analog or digital. They also include one methods for importing content to manage new items, and several presentation methods to make items available for use. Although ECM content may be protected by digital rights management (DRM), it is not required. ECM is distinguished from general content management by its cognizance of the processes and procedures of the enterprise for which it is created.
Collaborative product development (CPD) is a business strategy, work process and collection of software applications that facilitates different organizations to work together on the development of a product. It is also known as collaborative product definition management (cPDM).
Supplier relationship management (SRM) is the systematic, enterprise-wide assessment of suppliers' strengths, performance and capabilities with respect to overall business strategy, determination of what activities to engage in with different suppliers, and planning and execution of all interactions with suppliers, in a coordinated fashion across the relationship life cycle, to maximize the value realized through those interactions. The focus of supplier relationship management is the development of two-way, mutually beneficial relationships with strategic supply partners to deliver greater levels of innovation and competitive advantage than could be achieved by operating independently or through a traditional, transactional purchasing arrangement. Underpinning disciplines which support effective SRM include supplier information management, compliance, risk management and performance management.
Open innovation is a term used to promote an information age mindset toward innovation that runs counter to the secrecy and silo mentality of traditional corporate research labs. The benefits and driving forces behind increased openness have been noted and discussed as far back as the 1960s, especially as it pertains to interfirm cooperation in R&D. Use of the term 'open innovation' in reference to the increasing embrace of external cooperation in a complex world has been promoted in particular by Henry Chesbrough, adjunct professor and faculty director of the Center for Open Innovation of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, and Maire Tecnimont Chair of Open Innovation at Luiss.
The suggestion box is used for collecting slips of paper with input from customers and patrons of a particular organization. Suggestion boxes may also exist internally, within an organization, such as means for garnering employee opinion.
Design thinking refers to the set of cognitive, strategic and practical procedures used by designers in the process of designing, and to the body of knowledge that has been developed about how people reason when engaging with design problems.
A Virtual Customer Environment (VCE) is a web forum to facilitate customer co-innovation or user innovation.
Business agility refers to rapid, continuous, and systematic evolutionary adaptation and entrepreneurial innovation directed at gaining and maintaining competitive advantage. Business agility can be sustained by maintaining and adapting the goods and services offered to meet with customer demands, adjusting to the marketplace changes in a business environment, and taking advantage of available human resources.
Innovation management is a combination of the management of innovation processes, and change management. It refers to product, business process, marketing and organizational innovation. Innovation management is the subject of ISO 56000 series standards being developed by ISO TC 279.
In software engineering, a software development process or software development life cycle (SDLC) is a process of planning and managing software development. It typically involves dividing software development work into smaller, parallel, or sequential steps or sub-processes to improve design and/or product management. The methodology may include the pre-definition of specific deliverables and artifacts that are created and completed by a project team to develop or maintain an application.
Communities that support innovation have been referred to as communities of innovation (CoI), communities for innovation, innovation communities, open innovation communities, and communities of creation.
In computer supported brainstorming, team members contribute their ideas through electronic means either synchronously or asynchronously. The brainstorming software selected by the team mediates the individual interactions and helps to organize and shape the products of the brainstorming session. Computer supported brainstorming can be implemented using a wide variety of electronic technologies.
Design culture is an organizational culture focused on approaches that improve customer experiences through design. In every firm, the design culture is of significance as it allows the company to understand users and their needs. Integration of design culture in any organisation aims at creating experiences that add value to their respective users. In general, design culture entails undertaking design as the forefront of every operation in the organisation, from strategy formulation to execution. Every organisation is responsible for ensuring a healthy design culture through the application of numerous strategies. For instance, an organisation should provide a platform that allows every stakeholder to engage in design recesses. Consequently, employees across board need to incorporate design thinking, which is associated with innovation and critical thinking.