Organizations need leaders to prioritize and support ideation. With these tools and systems in place, you can then teach your employees to be better idea managers. As long as it creates transparency for employees, which in turn will encourage them to ideate. Your idea management tool can be simple or complex, specific to idea generation or part of another highly used project management tool. Without a management tool, leaders may not ask large groups of employees for ideas as there is no central place to store them. This way, employees can always see their ideas and when and how the company uses them. One simple and powerful way to encourage ideation is through an idea management tool that allows the company to collect all ideas in one place, often online, for sorting, evaluation and monitoring. Nothing is more frustrating to an employee than contributing a great idea that is never acted upon-or even worse, forgotten. Habit #4: Not Using Idea Management Tools This goes a long way in motivating employees, not only to do good work, but to focus on even more ideas for solving the customers’ problems. One of the best sources of incentive for employees is actually recognition from a customer. Ideation can be rewarded simply through words or other methods such as monetary gifts, extra time off, a special badge of acknowledgement, or being named to an elite group. If an organization can create an environment that attracts, encourages, and incentivizes workers to contribute ideas, it will have a wealth of ideas. Incentives are a great way to show appreciation and create excitement. No employer has a right to an employee’s creative capacity. They assume since someone is employed, the company should get that person’s ideas. Unfortunately, many employers take their employees’ ideas for granted. If employees do not feel valued or heard, they will not offer up their creative thinking to ideate for their company. Habit #3: Omitting Incentives for Ideation Once a system is identified, this will encourage and enable productive idea generation, and ensure all participants feel heard and that their ideas matter. The key is have a clear plan for when to ideate and what to do with those ideas once they are shared.
There are many proven methodologies for successful brainstorming. Do you remember the last time you were asked to a brainstorming session? Were the ideation activities organized to build upon one another? Or was it just an impromptu huddle? What happened to all of the ideas generated during the session? Were they collected and evaluated? Or did they disappear once everyone left the room? Brainstorming is often exactly that-a lot of ideas storming at each other in unstructured chaos. Habit #2: Failing to Create StructureĪnother reason that organizations don’t ideate is because there is no structure for the task. After all, as my co-author Ron Price and I demonstrated in our book The Innovator’s Advantage, it takes thousands of ideas to generate a single marketable success. Schedule regular time for coming up with ideas, whether through calendared meetings, structured brainstorming sessions, brownbag lunches, or online tools.
When ideation is not prioritized, organizations do not have enough ideas, let alone enough variety, to advance the business. Ideas should come from all employees and departments because it takes a multitude of ideas and viewpoints to face challenges and capitalize on opportunities. Rather than only ideating under duress, leaders should consistently set aside time in the calendar to generate ideas with their teams. Most companies do not actually prioritize ideation unless there is an emergency! If you are waiting for an emergency to come up with new ideas, you are simply being reactive.
Ideation, like any other business activity, requires time, discipline and commitment. Habit #1: Not Prioritizing Time for Ideation
CREATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING BREAKING HABITS HOW TO
Here are five common habits that hurt ideation and how to break them to steer your company to success.
There are many reasons for this, but there is always a solution. Ideas are the foundation for innovation, yet many companies struggle to ideate consistently and successfully. To continue creating and delivering value for customers, organizations have to come up with new ideas. Many still rely on old knowledge or even guesswork to face challenges that arise. Most organizations only innovate when they are forced to do so. They need to be, right? Unfortunately, the opposite is true. In today’s rapidly changing world, it’s easy to think that most companies are innovation factories-full of ideas for new products, services, and processes. Here are five ways to break the pattern and gather a wealth of ideas for your organization. Many companies find it hard to prioritize ideation.
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