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Innovation Tools - "Idea Central Offers a Comprehensive System for Enterprise Idea Management"

Idea Central 4.0 offers a comprehensive system for enterprise management

By Chuck Frey

innovation tools - idea central With idea management being such a new technology, it's important to select a system that is based on solid research into human factors issues -- like identifying the best practices for encouraging employees to share their best ideas, and how to ensure that the employees you designate to evaluate ideas actually do so on a timely basis. Imaginatik's Idea Central 4.0 is such a system. Its highly configurable options and extensive workflow capabilities make it easy for innovation managers to configure and manage idea generation campaigns with a minimum of effort.

While the product is used to implement suggestion programs, the core principle underlying the design of Idea Central 4.0 is the support of idea "campaigns" or "events." According to Imaginatik Research (a research organization run by Imaginatik), corporate innovation programs tend to produce higher-value ideas if they are limited to a specific time period and focused on a specific corporate objective or challenge. In contrast, many corporate suggestion systems are open-ended (no start or end dates) and aren't focused on a specific objective -- which tends to result in a low quantity of low quality ideas.

Using the system

The first page an employee sees when he or she enters an Idea Central 4.0 campaign contains the definition of the problem or challenge at hand. Employees can click through to a challenge page, which gives more background information about the objectives of the current ideation campaign. Accurately and completely framing the challenge helps to ensure higher quality, more consistent ideas, according to Imaginatik.

The idea input form is highly intuitive, and is set up so that employees can start using it immediately, with no training. Many fields within this form contain an "information" icon - a small button that employees can click on to read instructions for that form field. Providing users with this type of "contextual help" minimizes the need for employee training, so organizations can get up and running as soon as possible with Idea Central.

The description field in the new idea form can include links to Web pages or documents. Attachments can also be attached to an idea, and can include everything from pictures and drawings to engineering files, spreadsheets and text documents. A drop-down list asks employees to identify which business area of the company his or her new idea applies to; this saves administrators time when evaluating ideas.

The idea form can be configured for different types of idea, and up to four additional questions - text, check box or single value pick list - can be added. This speeds up the time to implement the system, and significantly reduces ongoing costs of customizing the system.

Human factors research increases utility of Idea Central 4.0

Imaginatik has put a lot of thought into "human factors" -- the sometimes quirky ways in which people interact with software and each other in collaborative environments. This is evident in the three options that Idea Central gives employees to identify themselves when submitting a new idea:

Show my name: With this option, the employee's name appears along with their idea submission.
Hide my name: Some of the best ideas may be political or controversial in nature, or may adversely affect people in other departments of the organization -- or even reflect badly on one's boss. Recognizing this, Idea Central's developers designed the system so that employees can submit ideas anonymously.
Hide my name unless it is requested and I accept: This is a hybrid option where the idea starts off as an anonymous idea, allowing for fairer evaluation, and the review team can ask for consent to find out the identity of the author.

According to Imaginatik Research, anonymous ideas are 67 percent more likely to be implemented; fewer high-quality ideas tend to be submitted if an "anonymous" option is not offered. In addition, 95 percent of employees are willing to have their identity disclosed at the proper time, which suggests that this feature appears to inspire a higher level of trust among employees, and makes them more likely to share their high potential but controversial ideas.

The "Idea Minder" is a unique feature of Idea Central 4.0. Anytime someone adds a comment or does something to an idea, its author automatically receives an e-mail message alerting them to that fact. This makes it easy for the author to find out what's going on with his or her idea, without having to log into the Idea Central application to search for it. The Idea Minder can also be used by people who just want to browse through ideas.

Employees can save an idea as a draft before formally submitting it to the system for review. This facilitates quick idea capture, and enables the employee to revisit the idea and add more detail to it. Near the end of a campaign Idea Central 4.0 automatically scans its database for draft ideas and notifies their authors; this feature prevents these nascent brainstorms from becoming orphans as the current idea campaign comes to a close.

When an employee submits a completed idea, a thank you screen appears; it enables the employee to automatically e-mail a link to this idea to any other employee on the system. This is a very useful collaboration feature, because it enables you to let your boss or co-workers know that you have submitted an idea, and to invite them to submit comments to support it or suggest improvements to it. It also allows companies to exploit local communities of practice to share the ideas between themselves.

Collaboration

One of the key differentiators between an idea management system and a suggestion box is the collaboration and idea-building tools. Whereas the suggestion box uses a post-and-review method, the idea management approach involves posting, reading other people's ideas, and commenting and building on them. The product includes a wide range of collaboration tools including Comment, Peer Review and numerous alert tools. Idea Central 4.0 recently won the Basex Excellence Award 2003 for Collaborative Systems, a remarkable achievement for an idea management application. (Note: the award comes out in May 2003).

Idea Central 4.0's comment and peer review feature encourage employees to build upon each other's ideas. This is a critical part of the process of generating high-quality ideas, because many ideas aren't fully thought through when submitted, according to Imaginatik CEO Mark Turrell. "This collaborative idea-building process can help to refine a mediocre idea into a world-class one," he explains. He said that ideas with comments are 30 to 50 percent more likely to be top-quality ideas. The company has also discovered that comments added to an idea can actually help reviewers to do their job better -- because these "enhanced" ideas tend to be more complete.

Idea Central 4.0 also includes some valuable security features. The system can be configured to be completely open (anyone can view and comment on any ideas) or relatively closed (to enable strict control of invention disclosure, for example). System administrators can also set up an "idea embargo," which falls somewhere in between these other two options. In other words, newly submitted ideas cannot be viewed by other employees for a certain number of days (i.e., they are temporarily embargoed). This feature, along with other security tools, allows companies to use Idea Central for invention disclosure and the development of trade secrets.

Ask an expert

If a reviewer needs additional information in order to properly evaluate an idea, he or she can ask an expert for input. The reviewer simply fills out of form with the expert's name, e-mail address, instructions for reviewing the idea and a deadline date for their answer, and Idea Central 4.0 automatically generates an e-mail message to that person. The system can also be set up to send a reminder to the expert at a pre-set interval prior to the deadline date. Once the expert has responded, Idea Central 4.0 automatically generates an e-mail message to the reviewer, letting him or her know that the process has been closed (the expert has responded).

Idea Central 4.0 also includes a powerful toolset for generating custom reports from its idea database. It also enables campaign administrators to print out special forms for paper-based review of ideas, which some of its clients require.

The idea review process

innovation tools - idea central Idea Central supports up to 10 weighted criteria for evaluating ideas. The idea review form includes what Imaginatik calls "in-place guidance" -- pop-up descriptions that provide reviewers with additional details on exactly what each numerical rating on the scale means. According to Turrell, this helps to ensure greater consistency of reviews, and can help to speed up the review process.

Idea Central also supports a two-step review process, which allows organizations to have a junior reviewer do a first "screen" of all of the ideas, followed by a more thorough review by another individual or group of reviewers. Idea Central 4.0's options for scoring and weighting responses are flexible and highly configurable.

Configuration v. Customization

The maturity of Idea Central 4.0 comes through in the myriad of configuration options to control the functionality of the application and the presentation of information. Administrators can create custom idea forms, adapt the review mechanism to the type of ideas being collected, and define specialized workflows. They can also turn on and off functionality, such as removing the peer review feature. "This level of configurability speeds up the implementation process, reduces the client's dependence on the vendor for basic changes, and reduces the total cost of ownership," Turrell explains.

Conclusion

With Idea Central 4.0, Imaginatik has assembled a very impressive set of tools for gathering and evaluating a large quantity of ideas quickly and effectively, with well thought out and flexible workflow options. In addition, the company's aggressive commitment to customer research - through its Imaginatik Research subsidiary - is commendable, and helps to give Turrell and his team deep understanding into the above-mentioned "human factors" issues, which in turn help to make Idea Central a deeper, more valuable and useful idea management system. As a result, Idea Central 4.0 is not only effective at helping companies to gather and evaluate ideas, but also provides an environment that stimulates creativity and collaboration in some powerful ways.

About InnovationTools

InnovationTools is a new Web site designed to help busy executives to be more innovative in their businesses. In today's fast-moving world, the need for fresh ideas and innovative solutions has never been greater.

At the same time, the number of tools and techniques to help people generate productive and valuable ideas has been steadily growing. But chances are, you haven't been aware of many of these resources, because they're not easy to find. Our goal is to help you to learn more about the tools, strategies and techniques you can use to be more creative in your business -- and have more fun in the process.

This web site is the brainchild of Chuck Frey, a creative thinker with 20+ years of experience in PR, marketing, business strategy and information services.