Ideation is a creative and systematic method for generating valuable ideas and refining them further in a multi-stage process consisting of phases and gates. While the number of ideas decreases over the course of the process, the depth of content increases. Employees, test users, clients, experts, service providers, or external crowds can be involved in corporate ideation.
An idea is a novel proposal, concept, or solution that addresses an existing challenge or opportunity. Ideas are formed by information connected in new ways and usually are abstract concepts that follow a specific purpose or spontaneous impulse.
“A good idea is a network. A specific constellation of neurons—thousands of them—fire in sync with each other for the first time in your brain, and an idea pops into your consciousness.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
The first records of ideation come from the 1800s. The verb ideate is recorded earlier, in the 1600s, and derives from the Latin verb "ideare", from the Greek idea, meaning “model,” “pattern,” or “notion.” This is also where the word idea comes from. Ideation can be another way to say thinking, but it’s usually used in a slightly more specific way. Ideation is idea creation—the formation of thoughts and mental images. It’s often used in the context of business development to refer to brainstorming for new products or business opportunities.
Ideation often happens with a larger crowd in order to generate as many and diverse ideas as possible. This practice emerged in the 18th century when the British Parliament asked the population to submit ideas for a method of measuring longitude at sea. Accurate knowledge of longitude and latitude was required to determine a ship’s position at sea and thus ensure safe navigation. With a prize of £20,000 for whoever came up with a solution, a large number of proposals were submitted based on a variety of approaches. Ultimately, from all the ideas submitted, a solution was found that allowed for a more accurate determination of longitude.
Another example is the synthesis of margarine. In 1869, Napoleon III offered a prize to anyone who discovered a process for making a butter substitute for the armed forces and the lower classes. The result was the idea for processed fat, today known as margarine. Both examples show not only the long history of idea generation with a large crowd but also the effectiveness of ideation as a method for innovation development.
Over time, such approaches for solving complex problems became more and increasingly valued. In particular, ideation challenges, either in-house or with an external crowd, have gained popularity as a method for generating new ideas and as a source of innovation. This has already been put into practice successfully by established companies such as Adidas, BMW Group, Cisco, or Porsche.
In many companies, the terms innovation management, ideation, and idea management are still used synonymously. However, a closer look at the end-to-end innovation management process reveals that there are significant differences.
At ITONICS, we believe that:
Simply collecting ideas is not sufficient in the long run, as a strategic basis with a justified course of action is missing. We divide the innovation process into 3 areas: Where to Play? How to Win? What to Execute? Each of these areas focuses on different activities that together form an end-to-end innovation value chain.
Idea generation is only one step within this end-to-end innovation process. We see ideation as a relevant component in the How to Win stage that translates insights from the environmental scanning activities into targeted idea development. Qualified ideas can develop by considering threats and opportunities relating to environmental scanning insights.
The distinction between ideation and idea management is somewhat more difficult. While ideation generally describes the creative, multi-stage methodology of idea generation, we understand idea management to be more of an operational process in the corporate context for the systematic generation, enrichment, evaluation, and management of ideas in all phases of the innovation process.
Also see: Effective Idea Management: How It Can Help Your Business
Generating ideas in collaboration with employees, clients and partners helps to identify and create new products, services, and business models, and harnessing the creative potential of a crowd can be crucial to success. Usually, ideas are explored in answer to a specific question, or as a solution to a certain problem. Often, the ideas generated are based on the wishes or expectations for a product. Involving clients in the ideation process can provide valuable information that results in more robust ideation. By integrating users directly into product development, this information can be gathered better and faster than through conventional methods such as market research or trend scouting, which can result in improved product-market fit solutions.
The key benefits of generating ideas collaboratively are as follows:
To ensure that your organization takes advantage of these benefits and maintains world-class ideation, the following challenges must be considered:
Ideation finds various fields of application in today's innovation context. As highlighted before, ideas can be generated, for example, at the corporate level with employees, external stakeholders like clients and partners, or from an unknown external crowd. This can happen in a contest setting or in ideation workshops. In this chapter, we will dive deeper into five different approaches to idea generation:
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Closed vs. Open Innovation (Crowdsourcing) |
Closed InnovationWithin the innovation process, you can differentiate between open and closed innovation. Closed innovation describes the conventional approach that innovation is developed exclusively within the company itself. This includes the generation of ideas for products, services, or business models, to concept creation and development. Open Innovation/ CrowdsourcingIn order to increase the innovation capabilities within the company and create competitive advantages, opening up the conventional innovation process beyond internal boundaries and integrating the innovation potential of external stakeholders has proven to be a promising approach within the past decade. This is referred to as open innovation. By sourcing knowledge externally, organizations can counteract market uncertainties and the complexity of innovation and knowledge recombination. Open innovation involves a wide range of external actors, including users, customers, suppliers, universities, startups, and competitors. A variety of formats exist for accessing external knowledge, such as competitions and campaigns, corporate venture capital, or open-source platforms. |
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Design Thinking |
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Design thinking describes a process for developing new concepts. It is often associated with creative facilitation, but the discipline is much more than creative workshops. It refers to user-centered methods for guiding innovation and an innovation framework that allows non-designers to approach problems like designers. Thanks to its open, flexible, and human-centered nature, design thinking became a popular method for driving innovation. The design thinking process consists of five steps: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. After understanding users' existing problems and defining their needs in the first two steps, the ideation phase involves developing ideas for potential solutions to fix the problem. There are a variety of ideation techniques that can be applied here, such as brainstorming or the Crazy 8’s method. Monitoring trends can be another helpful starting point, as they indicate consumer needs and demands based on observed changes in behavior. After generating a set of ideas, they are usually prioritized (e.g. in idea portfolios) before the most promising one is prototyped (MVPs - minimum viable products or mockups) and tested with users. This process helps innovators to identify at an early stage of the innovation process whether a product idea has value for users or not. Also see: |
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Ideation Workshop |
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An ideation workshop is a session focused exclusively on the development of new ideas, with the main objective of driving innovation. It usually involves stakeholders from different teams and departments and promotes cross-functional collaboration and innovation. What makes idea workshops special is that they take place in a different environment than the normal workspace to foster creativity. Once you have defined your problem statement, you can use various ideation techniques to generate a wide range of ideas. Thereby, lateral thinking needs to be encouraged and the focus is on the quantity rather than the quality of ideas. At this stage, it is all about generating as many ideas as possible, regardless of the technical feasibility. Moreover, ideas generated in an ideation workshop are not judged, which encourages participants to think outside the box and come up with novel ideas. To ensure that your ideation workshop is a success, you should follow these steps:
After your ideation workshop, |
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Ideation Challenge |
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Depending on the context, the ideation challenge can sometimes be referred to as an “idea campaign”, “innovation challenge”, or “ideation contest”. Regardless of the name, ideation challenges are in essence creative activities that involve a fixed or varying number of - either internal or external - participants, contributors, and/or experts coming together to submit innovative ideas on a specific need or problem, evaluating them among themselves and thus filtering out the best winning ideas. Ideation challenges provide an opportunity to focus on specific sub-goals of the innovation strategy. The setting of an ideation challenge can be either top-down or bottom-up: |
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Idea Portfolio |
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Idea portfolios are used to evaluate generated ideas and prioritize the most relevant ones for achieving strategic goals. In an idea portfolio, two variables are determined according to which the ideas are arranged in a portfolio or diagram. The method can balance different needs since two variables are used. Due to its analytical nature, the method allows for quick but reliable sorting of ideas. In addition, it also helps make informed decisions and even provides a strategic view of options. Source: This is Service Design Doing Usually, those idea portfolios are used in a workshop setting with appropriate experts to evaluate generated ideas. First, the criteria for ranking the ideas must be defined. These can be, for example, the "value that the implementation of the idea has for the user/customer" and the "effort to bring the idea to life". Next, a portfolio (diagram) is created with both axes labeled either remotely on a wall, virtually on a whiteboard, or by using software. Finally, the ideas previously generated and written down are evaluated according to the criteria and arranged on the diagram. You now have an overview of all the ideas and can decide which ones to invest in further. Usually, the most interesting ideas at the beginning |
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A proper ideation process can help you to find answers to some very important questions within your innovation journey:
1. Choose a challenge or opportunity spaceFor your ideation activities to be a success, an organization must define the key stakeholders and what you expect from them. For example, large companies need to decide whether all company employees should be invited to participate, regardless of their function, or whether participation should be limited to specific departments or functions when developing ideas on a particular issue. In addition, stakeholders are relevant depending on whether idea generation takes place internally or externally.
When considering internal ideation challenges or workshops on a corporate level, the following functions need to be included based on the ideation process:
When opening up the ideation process to external stakeholders, the following sources of knowledge can become relevant:
If you want to learn more about how to gain management commitment for strategic innovation activities and how to communicate them effectively to relevant stakeholders, read these blog articles:
Any innovation activities will be wiped out relatively quickly if they do not generate measurable outputs. Management in particular will soon demand meaningful numbers, which is why you should start thinking about the strategic direction of your activities early on. This is just as true - or especially true - for idea management. If the strategic basis is missing, your ideas will almost certainly lead nowhere and you will quickly lose the interest and commitment of the management. However, this can be prevented at an early stage.
Financial impacts unfold only in the future, so justifying and aligning innovation activities with desired future goals requires a special kind of metrics: actionable innovation metrics.
Actionable innovation metrics must be relative (input/output) and time-bound to identify actual progress. They should relate to specific goals that provide direction for innovation activities. Based on these characteristics, actionable KPIs indicate possible directions for change. This means either taking action to increase participant engagement or to improve process efficiency and effectiveness.
Metrics that help to assess the motivation and participation of people to contribute to ideation challenges
Metrics that help to assess how well ideas transform into innovations and whether the right ideas are selected
Using software for idea generation helps organizations to manage the whole ideation process and bring relevant stakeholders together on one platform. No matter if you just need some inspiration for innovative ideas or if you are facing specific problems or questions you can’t solve on your own, with a software solution you can bring different experts on board to work together on challenges within your corporate innovation landscape.
At ITONICS, we have developed an integrated framework including process, methodology, software support, and best practices in various industries to help clients establish a successful idea management function within the front end of innovation. ITONICS Campaigns is a digital innovation tool for running all ideation activities like campaigns (ideation challenges), phase-gate, collaborative evaluations, gamification, portfolio management, etc. With this tool, innovation departments can kickstart ideation challenges with a minimum of effort to spark disruptive ideas and new business models.
Ideation tools like ITONICS Campaigns help your company to build a company-wide innovation platform to accelerate future business growth. You can unleash entrepreneurial spirit within your organization and empower your innovation community to leverage game-changing opportunities. With our software we provide:
In 2015, Cisco launched its first and unique company-wide Innovate Everywhere Challenge. The goal was to drive global disruptive thinking, capture breakthrough innovation opportunities from Cisco employees, help them grow, and improve employee empowerment and collaboration across all functions. As a result, half of all Cisco employees, 36,600 experts, participated in the challenge, submitting a total of about 770 ideas. By collecting ideas specifically for key markets relevant to the company, new technologies, and business models, the resulting projects paid targeted dividends to the company's strategic development.
The Innovate Everywhere Challenge is powered by ITONICS collaborative innovation software and is now a best practice for innovation management at Cisco. The innovation program was awarded the Innovation Leader's Impact 2018 Award.
Also see:
Ideation becomes even more challenging when multiple sites and departments are expected to work together to develop new ideas and implement solutions. The establishment of a company-wide culture of innovation can therefore serve as a central driver for effective idea generation in any organization.
As a full-service provider of construction services, LEONHARD WEISS is one of the most efficient and successful construction companies in Germany. The exchange of knowledge of new ideas and solutions between the individual sites and subdivisions is of great importance for the innovative capacity of the construction company.
The idea management of LEONHARD WEISS called 3i (idea, initiative, innovation) is supported by the digital innovation platform of ITONICS. The platform connects different company locations, departments, and hierarchical levels enabling experts to actively engage in the future development of the company.
With more than 1,800 active users, +800 submitted and +250 implemented ideas, the new innovation ecosystem has become a company-wide go-to space for trend scouting, idea generation, and innovation portfolio management.
Create your own success story and discover how the ITONICS software solution can support your ideation activities.
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