(I get) Big Ideas about Idea Management

There’s a little bit of Alice’s looking glass when tackling this subject but there are a bunch of smart people thinking up new ideas about idea management lately. I have to believe if you put this much effort into topic good things will result. Every day I read blogs and tweets. I see demonstrations of idea management software. I have Google agents constantly searching and reporting back to me. I read white papers and look at graphs…all about the topic of idea management.

I also talk to companies exploring the subject. Folks from the intellectual property department, from legal, from product development, from IT all are trying to learn more about idea management. Forester and Gartner predict most companies will have idea management systems in place sometime in the next few years. These are sophisticated buyers who want to know how idea management systems will overcome the “fuzzy front end” of innovation when a ton of ideas get generated and stalled at the front of the process. They want to know how ideas get moved through the system, how they get enhanced.

If you’re a social media success it probably means you’re on all the time. You’re trying every new tool that comes your way; you’re tweeting and posting status lines. You’re reading other’s posts and noodling over what others are noodling about. They say it takes ten years to become an expert; ten years of “deliberate practice” but social tools are really just maturing. And the ideas management tools of the past don’t operate the way they do today. So we’re all learning the subject together.
Idea management used to be about the employee suggestion box.

The joke was always that the slot led to a garbage can on the other side of the wall. Nowadays idea management is really about using some combination of social tools to address a virtual team for inspiration, to dynamically assemble and collaborate on an innovative subject. Plus processes aid the workflow in order to determine which ideas are best; which are on target; which sync up with our organization’s mandates; which ideas yield revenue or cost savings and make us more productive.

Many people, experts and interested parties are thinking about the subject of ideas and innovation. They write about how good ideas can’t be taken for granted. These ideas need to be nurtured by systems. They’re discussed and reviewed and critiqued. All of us who follow the topic are getting smarter, not because of the subject matter, but because of the intense scrutiny we’re dedicating.
The keys today versus the past are the communications systems only recently enabled by social tools. With good communications, ideas get clarified. Instead of strangling the ideas on a cul-de-sac, the crowd can enhance ideas and flush them out. The processes can rank them and move them closer to execution.

Idea management systems use a variety of tools besides the typical social ones we’re all used to. There are markets (treating ideas like stocks and bonds), there are games (like contests and voting mechanisms), there are semantic tags (to help ideas with commonality find each other and perhaps converge) and there are reward systems (like t-shirts, i-pods, stock bonuses and reputation points) to get interested parties…well, interested.

So idea management systems effect more than idea generation, they affect the shape of ideas. And mash-ups of technologies diffuse previous “incompleteness” barriers that always prevented an organization from embracing innovation.  Open systems invite "the crowd" to encourage innovation.  On the road to innovation comes the collateral benefit of culture change as organizations embrace collaboration.

So we live in great times. A bunch of smart people are dedicating themselves to the study of ideas and to the study of idea management. The result has to be new, innovative approaches, easily shared and likely to proliferate. Feel free to join the party.

A new LinkedIn group dedicated to idea management has been formed. I hope you’ll join, learn and contribute.