Idea Central Overview
The key to exploiting a company's creative potential is a coordinated approach to the key stages of the Idea Management process. Imaginatik's Idea Central application addresses these stages and takes into account the relevant people issues that are involved in these processes.
Idea Central focuses the creative abilities of participants to generate, capture and automatically share ideas across the organization. It provides the necessary tools to stimulate the creation, identification and development of good ideas as quickly as possible and to select the best ones for exploitation. Idea Central recognizes that these activities are the key elements of effective innovation, and it provides a comprehensive solution to support and measure them.
Challenging Employees
Idea Central enables an organization to align its innovation capacity with its business needs. Challenges can be posted by relevant business leaders to highlight critical issues that need to be addressed. Moreover, Idea Central allows to continuously launch focused campaigns to address separate business issues across the company. It maximizes innovation in your organization by providing an environment that stimulates creativity. The system is easy to use, can be accessed readily and puts no constraints on the expression of suggestions.
Capturing Ideas
Idea Central collects ideas immediately in a central place, overcoming geographical and organizational barriers, and ensuring that the review process starts as quickly as possible. Ideas are classified automatically, making it easier for reviewers to process ideas and for people to find information that is useful to them. It fosters a positive attitude towards the submission of ideas, giving feedback to contributors throughout the process.
Sharing and Developing Ideas
Idea Central gives employees the opportunity to share ideas, and exchange comments and insight by accessing and adding to colleagues' ideas from across the organization. By allowing the user community to view the whole process, it stimulates active participation to make good ideas better and to highlight potential problems with other ideas.
Selecting and Exploiting Ideas
Idea Central provides a structured process to evaluate ideas and reach a prompt decision about future steps, allowing the implementation of good ideas as quickly as possible. It enables reviewers to collaborate effectively, allows several reviews to an idea with a multi-criteria scoring mechanism, and provides an efficient workflow for the review process.
Measuring Success
Idea Central includes a comprehensive set of tools to evaluate the progress and success of a company's Idea Management program.
Idea Central Benefits
Develop innovative products and services
Idea Central provides experts with a channel to feed innovative ideas into the organization. It also offers a way to collect suggestions from the entire company, rather than restricting input to a specialized department like R&D or marketing. It enables companies to collect cross-functional ideas which blend technology and business expertise to create market-leading products.
Continuously improve business processes
Ideas for process improvements can be applied in a company's manufacturing sites, offices, retail outlets, and across business functions. Companies benefit from capturing suggestions from all employees, including ideas which already have been implemented successfully but never shared. Idea Central ensures that the best ideas are quickly uncovered and communicated, supporting your organization's continuous improvement and cost-cutting efforts.
Harness creative talent to achieve corporate goals
Executives can communicate and implement a new strategy successfully by inviting all employees to contribute ideas on how to achieve the business goals. An Idea Central event focuses people to deal with the issues, and as people get engaged, they are more likely to understand and buy in to the strategy.
Increase employee motivation by making things happen
An employee suggestion system which really works is extremely motivating for everybody, from the employee to the CEO. Companies can get tremendous business value through implementing good ideas, and at the same time demonstrate to their employees that they and their ideas are highly respected.
Typical Idea Central Projects
Marketing and branding
Companies can enhance their existing creative processes with input from employees, to get new perspectives from individuals who are often consumers of the company's products as well as employees. Typical events include brand naming, designing novel marketing initiatives, and developing new products.
New product development
All departments that are related to specific products can contribute their expertise and their innovative ideas in an Idea Central initiative. The combination of these ideas enables better and more innovative products to be developed, avoiding the typical restriction of the NPD process to a small group of people.
Process improvements
Processes can be continuously improved by capturing suggestions from employees across different parts of the company. All employees have ideas on how to make their company's processes more efficient. The best ideas are highlighted and shared, which facilitates their implementation across the whole organization.
Cost reduction initiatives
Cost-cutting ideas captured from employees can be leveraged by quickly implementing them across departments and business units. The multiplier effect increases the positive impact on the company's bottom line. Some clients use the application in conjunction with 'gainsharing' and Six Sigma programs as a source of potential savings and improvements.
Human resources programs
Idea Central increases motivation among employees by involving them in company initiatives. Moreover, the number and type of ideas that are received are valuable indicators of the company morale and employees' attitudes.
Internal communications
Executives can communicate critical company issues via Idea Central. A participative approach generates higher employee involvement and better understanding of the company’s strategies and vision.