Stop Losing Your Great Ideas!

Stop losing your great ideas by using idea management processes in your business.

What is idea management? Although it's a relatively new 'concept' in business management theory, put simply, it's about how new ideas for a business are translated into actions, new products or processes.

I know businesses have been using new ideas, creating new products and finding new ways to do what they do for many years, so why the big fuss about idea management? The real answer is many businesses have been slow to act on any new ideas and end up not going anywhere. They mark time, not moving from the same spot while everyone around them continue moving forward.

How do you move forward?

When you start a business you're fully involved in the creative processes. You're involved in designing the business, how it works, how people work within it. As the business grows, more people come on board and consequently become involved in its future. This can mean two things.

Firstly, you have access to more business creativity and ideas than you had before. Each new person has the potential to you ideas to change the future of the business, possibly even its direction.

Secondly, there is more likelihood of ideas getting 'lost in the mix' and never being considered or implemented.

Idea management helps you manage the innovation process

As I mentioned earlier, as your business grows you have access to more ideas. Ideas with the potential to help your business continue to grow and make bigger profits.

The difficulty though is in both gathering and having processes in place to act on these great new ideas.

Idea management aims to help you

• gather ideas for your business,
• evaluate and discard some, and
• work on implementing the worthwhile ones.

Gathering ideas in the first place can be difficult.

It's not easy to get people to come forward with those potential business changing creative ideas. You also need to be able to get suggestions from all different sources, for example, employees and customers.

One of the most common ways of gathering ideas is to place a 'suggestion box' in a prominent position asking for ideas. Unfortunately suggestion boxes don't work as well any more. They may at first, especially if it was started with great fanfare and a competition with a prize for the best new idea. But over time ideas slow down to a trickle and then nothing at all. Back to square one.

So why don't they work? Mostly because they they focus on only one part of the problem - they help to garner new ideas for your business but they do nothing to react, evaluate or implement them.

Often businesses gather these great ideas from the suggestion box, but didn't have the means or the processes in place to evaluate or implement the best ideas. Meanwhile, employees and customers felt frustration at having no response about their idea and eventually the suggestion box would stay empty.

But you still need some ways of gathering ideas, both from employees and your current customers. Giving staff (and customer) recognition and rewards for ideas is often a good way to encourage a continual flow of great ideas.

Surveys from both employees and customers is another way of addressing any problems and also gaining new ideas that can be implemented. Some businesses have changed the physical suggestion box into an electronic format where people can 'post' their ideas.

You need to make sure, though, people are listened to when they present an idea, even if you don't think it's very good or suitable to your business needs or problems. Sometimes one idea can lead to another and a winner idea is the result!

Whichever way you gather the new ideas for your business, idea management is a very effective way of gathering, capturing and evaluating that next big idea which will propel your business ahead of your competitors.

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