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The Volume-Quality Balance

There are many creativity techniques that preach the gospel that all ideas are, in principle, good. For example, in 1939 a team lead by advertising executive Alex F. Osborne coined the term 'brainstorming' and stipulated that people should refrain from critiquing ideas until after the idea generation session. By suspending judgment, this approach intends to stimulate a flow of suggestions, even if the ideas are somewhat crazy, and hopes that the session will yield one or two top concepts from the volume of ideas.

Whilst our past research has focused on top concepts, this Research Note considers the importance of the overall volume of ideas. How much volume should be generated and what level of quality concepts should an organization look for?

The process of Idea Management, as developed over the last five years by Imaginatik Research, operates under the following principles:

All companies have a limited capacity to innovate, i.e. there is a limited ability to handle new things due constraints on people, resources, time, management attention, etc.
Companies need to fill the Innovation Pipeline with an appropriate number of top concepts, otherwise the pipeline may either overflow or run dry.
There is a certain volume of ideas required to 'guarantee' the number of top concepts (Research has found that old fashioned suggestion programs yield less than one top concept per 100 ideas collected, compared to three very promising concepts using the event approach to Idea Management).
There is a need for diversity of the idea contributors, in terms of functional areas, work experience, and personality types in order to generate high impact concepts.
The level of high quality participation is increased dramatically by compressing the time available to act, based on Imaginatik's event approach.
Well-designed online Idea Management systems provide structure to support the process in an efficient manner. The collaborative nature of these systems yields high quality developed ideas alongside the spontaneous, 'top of mind' brainstorm ideas.

The basis for an organization's Idea Management efforts is its Innovation Capacity, which limits the number of innovative projects that the company can expect to implement. The overall innovation process, including the Idea Management component, needs to be designed in such a way that it generates the right volume of ideas - from a diverse group of people - in order to harvest the appropriate number of concepts at a top quality level. Many companies spend too little time and effort at the front-end of the innovation process, with the result that management is forced to accept mediocre ideas - the 'best of a bad bunch' - as projects. At the PDMA Conference 2003 in Boston, speakers frequently described that efforts to improve the front-end collection and development of ideas significantly increased the success rate of projects and products in the market. Indeed, just implementing a multi-stage evaluation process (i.e. more than just a 'go' / 'no go' decision) at the front-end increased the likelihood of success by 20%.

Advanced Idea Management programs, primarily driven by the event approach, generate a series of idea pools on a variety of topics. For example, one event may be to collect new market ideas for an existing product line, and another event could be to find uses for a new material developed by R&D. A typical idea pool, generated from a two- to four-week Idea Management event using Imaginatik's software and process, generates:

40 - 65 ideas for Scientific or Technical events
65 - 200 ideas for Commercial, Process or Market Development events
150 - 450 ideas for Market Insight, Consumer Product, Marketing or Brand Naming events

Every event has its own dynamic, based on the topic, the timing, the problem statement, the people invited, and the internal communication process. However, in most cases - using the Imaginatik approach - the ideas split into the following areas:

2% - 3% high impact, high quality concepts
10% - 25% ideas worthy of further development or combination
20% - 45% ideas that have already been considered or implemented or would results in too limited an impact
5% - 10% duplicate entries of ideas
15% - 30% 'non-ideas', i.e. submissions that are problem statements, observations, and WIBNI's ("wouldn't it be nice if...")
Less that 1% of ideas that are frivolous, jokey or rude

Even the best event will generate a large percentage of ideas that are not worth taking further, usually over 65% of the total ideas. These ideas can clog up the review process and overwhelm the evaluation team if the overall volume of contributions is high. Reviewers are usually volunteers who need to take time out of their daily routine in order to conduct reviews. In many cases the reviewers are also senior managers who do not have time to spend on inappropriate suggestions.

One method of overcoming the problem of initial volume is by implementing advanced evaluation tools that allow reviewers to sift through large numbers of ideas in a short period of time. Our research has helped direct the development of new evaluation tools within Imaginatik's Idea Management software, Idea Central, and the results have been impressive. We have found that reviewers do their work in continuous sessions of 30 - 45 minutes. With new evaluation tools, reviewers can process over 60 ideas in 30 minutes, compared to 10 - 20 ideas with past versions of the software.

Ultimately the purpose of Idea Management is to deliver high quality, high impact concepts that can be implemented to deliver value. Our view of Idea Management is based on the premise that you need to start with a diverse range of ideas, but the overall volume must be managed in order to obtain the desired output. Excessive volume increases the noise in the signal-to-noise ratio, making it harder for the top concepts to emerge. Too much volume also prevents the reviewers from recognizing ideas with high potential, and it frustrates the contributors who quickly realize that their creative input is lost. (A recent Imaginatik Research case study described the problems that emerged from this situation and that lead to the cancellation of the company's suggestion program).

The event-based approach provides the best overall framework for managing the volume-quality balance. Companies collect ideas as they are needed in the business, using a process called 'dynamic knowledge'. The duration of the event is time limited to force people to contribute in a timely manner and not procrastinate. The themed approach to Idea Management reduces the number of random or tangential submissions, helping the reviewers to focus on the concepts that count. In addition, the ability to read other people's ideas and the availability of search tools helps to reduce the incidence of duplicates. Furthermore, collaboration areas within an advanced Idea Management application encourage participants to build and improve on existing concepts, rather than creating ideas from scratch.

A good Idea Management process is therefore designed to solicit ideas for targeted events, to efficiently uncover the top concepts, and to move them on to implementation. Innovation managers should strive to create a balanced program that generates an appropriate number of focused ideas, and a review process that quickly filters the ideas, allowing experts and senior managers the time to concentrate on the top concepts. Ultimately companies should look to expand their capacity to implement innovation, which would enable them to cope with a larger number of promising concepts. Idea Management then becomes a sustainable process within the organization, one that demonstrably generates high returns over a period of time and in many different business areas

If you have any ideas, feedback, or concepts you would like to share, please contact research@imaginatik.com.

Reference: The Volume-Quality Balance - RN-1003-1