Collaborative Idea Management – what are the success factors?
My Applied Innovation Management article deals with the challenge to engage the entire organization and beyond to contribute to innovation in an organization. At Ericsson, we have been using a tool for collaborative idea management for some time now and it is still growing, spreading to all parts of the organization. A clear message on innovation from top-management and the fact that we have integrated the tool into our collaboration initiative (which means that we are building on an existing IT infrastructure, in our case SharePoint, with established support etc. rather that putting in place a separate IT system) have definitely contributed to the success and widespread use.
I would like to initiate a discussion on the success factors for making collaborative idea management work. What is your opinion and/or experience?
Tags: collaboration, ideation, innovation
Views: 133
Replies to This Discussion
-
Permalink Reply by Kelli Shuter Cessna on -
Happy to share. We started a little over a year ago with the idea generation and management system, but that was part of a larger innovation initiative that launched on our intranet almost 2 years ago.
Our system is open to absolutely everyone in the company at all levels. We marketed both through company-wide email blasts from our Communications Dept, at our annual knowledge-sharing events, with a separate "Take 5" minutes to share campaign, and via mentions in key exec's web casts. Those were the main approaches.
There's more information about the overall innovation approach on our public site.
http://www.mwhglobal.com/MWHGlobal/MWH_Forrester_Groundswell_Entry....
(fyi - our site is currently down for maintenance, hopefully that won't last long.)
Kelli
Magnus Karlsson said:Thanks Kelli for sharing your experience. I am interested in knowing more about your initative. When did you start? How did you market the initiative? Did you aim for all employees?
-
Permalink Reply by Sunil Kumar Yadav on -
I think innovation should be focus on 4 billions people whose income level is less the 2 $ per day so called bottom of pyramid. invenotor give the value for the money to many.
-
Permalink Reply by Håkan Wernersson on -
Very interesting article and also following discussion. One question: How do you handle patent issues in a such an open system?
-
Permalink Reply by Magnus Karlsson on -
Hi Håkan
At Ericsson we have a separate patent track that has been in place long before we started with collaborative idea management. In our intructions to the users of the open system, it says that if they know or think that their idea is patentable, they should check with the patent department first. Since we are targetting all employees with the open system, not everyone knows about patents and what is patentable. If an idea that might be patentable is discovered in the open system, the idea creator can be contacted and he/she can go to the patent department after removing the idea. In this way we can increase the flow of ideas also to the patent track since we have more "expert eyes" on the open idea flow. In many cases the ideas are described at a high level in the open system and does not reveal patent relevant details.
- ‹ Previous
- 1
- 2
- 3
- Next ›
© 2012 Created by Sven Andersson.
Powered by
