Ideas bank

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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]

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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.

Innovation

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.

Examples

See also

Related Research Articles

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."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Innovation</span> Practical implementation of improvements

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.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brainstorming</span> Group creativity technique

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Business process modeling</span> Activity of representing processes of an enterprise

Business process modeling (BPM) in business process management and systems engineering is the activity of representing processes of an enterprise, so that the current business processes may be analyzed, improved, and automated. BPM is typically performed by business analysts, who provide expertise in the modeling discipline; by subject matter experts, who have specialized knowledge of the processes being modeled; or more commonly by a team comprising both. Alternatively, the process model can be derived directly from events' logs using process mining tools.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Business process re-engineering</span> Business management strategy

Business process re-engineering (BPR) is a business management strategy originally pioneered in the early 1990s, focusing on the analysis and design of workflows and business processes within an organization. BPR aims to help organizations fundamentally rethink how they do their work in order to improve customer service, cut operational costs, and become world-class competitors.

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 bring 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).

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Suggestion box</span>

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.

Business process management (BPM) is the discipline in which people use various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business processes. Any combination of methods used to manage a company's business processes is BPM. Processes can be structured and repeatable or unstructured and variable. Though not required, enabling technologies are often used with BPM.

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.

References

  1. Sandstrom, C., & Bjork, J. (2010). Idea management systems for a changing innovation landscape. International Journal of Product Development, 11(3-4), 310-324.
  2. See the definition for Open Source Hardware from the Open Source Hardware Association, http://www.oshwa.org/definition/
  3. Dorta, T., Perez, E., & Lesage, A. (2008). The ideation gap:: hybrid tools, design flow and practice. Design studies, 29(2), 121-141.
  4. Sukhov, Alexandre (2019). The human side of idea screening (PhD dissertation). Karlstads universitet. Retrieved from http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-75769, accessed 2019-12-18
  5. "El potencial innovador del país se concentra en un 'Banco de Ideas'" (in Spanish)
  6. "Betterific Is Like Reddit for Customer Feedback". Mashable. Retrieved 26 January 2016.
  7. Idea Drop
  8. Hassan, Syed (February 2021). "innovation cum tech fastest way to emerge as knowledge-economy". Pakistan Observer.
  9. How it could be different
  10. "Home". National Idea Bank Pakistan. Retrieved 2021-09-30.