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A diagram of the ideas campaign process.
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Idea Management: How an Ideas Campaign Works
A Quick Introduction
Jenni uses our ideas campaign approach to innovation process management. Ideas campaigns are structured events designed following proven creative problem solving (CPS) methodology combined with business analytics. The result is an effective approach for generating ideas in a collaborative space and then evaluating them in order to identify and combine the ideas with the greatest profit potential. An ideas campaign is a simple yet effective way for you to structure your innovation process in order to achieve your maximum innovation potential over the long term.
This is how ideas campaigns work in a nutshell:
1. Preparation
The aim of an ideas campaign is to generate several innovative solutions to a given problem. Thus, the first step is to identify the actual problem. Be careful! What at first may seem to be the problem could in actuality prove to be a mere part of a larger, overriding problem. Consider...
A logistics division's costs are going through the roof owing in large part to the poor fuel consumption of their fleet of trucks, exacerbated by the high cost of diesel fuel. The division manager may believe her problem is the truck's fuel consumption. It is not. The problem is the high operational costs of her division. If she had run an ideas campaign on improving her trucks' fuel consumption, she might well have got some good ideas. But they probably would not have solved the actual problem effectively.
The best way to determine the actual problem is to look at the apparent problem and related issues. Then ask yourself questions such as "Why is this a problem?", "What else is a factor?", "What would we like the situation to be in 6 months/12 months/5 years?" and so on.
Your Jenni Innovation Coach can help you to identify and clarify business problems -- in complete confidence, of course!
2. Challenge
Once the problem is identified, you formulate it into a challenge, which is a concise, terse question, such as "How might we reduce our energy consumption?" or "What kinds of healthy snack foods might we develop?" or "What business opportunities might we exploit in China?" Jenni's innovation challenge library and your Jenni Innovation Coach can help you formulate effective challenges that meet your business requirements.
3. Promotion
In order for your ideas campaign to be a success, you need people to submit ideas. That means promoting your campaign. Jenni includes an e-mail based promotion tool that you can use to inform participants of your new campaign. Moreover, Jenni's rewards module allows you to set up and manage rewards that can be powerful motivators for participation in your ideas campaigns. In addition, your Jenni innovation coach can help you devise non-Jenni tools for promoting your ideas campaigns: such as posters, announcements in company publications, activities and more.
4. Collaborative Idea Sharing
This is the fun part of an ideas campaign: people submitting ideas and collaborating on them! Jenni gives you the choice of two different collaboration methods: traditional (in which comment-like building blocks can be appended to already submitted ideas) and our unique IdeaWikis (in which participants collaborate on submitted ideas in a wiki-like environment).
5. Evaluation
A good ideas campaign will generate 10s or even 100s of ideas. You need to be able to evaluate them in order to identify those which have the greatest potential to become profitable innovations. Fortunately, Jenni provides a suite of idea review modules that allow you to combine ideas, evaluate them and perform SWOT analyses. Jenni even includes an open-ended review module that allows you to process ideas from Jenni into your existing software tools for further development into business cases, projects or almost anything.
6. Implementation
The generating of ideas is a creative process. Turning those creative ideas into reality and profiting from them is innovation. Ultimately, the final decision of whether or not to implement an idea cannot be made by a software tool. It needs to be made by human managers like you. However, thanks to Jenni's evaluation tools you and other managers get the information you need to make intelligent business decisions about which ideas to implement.
Innovation Process Management
An ideas campaign is a single event that typically lasts between one and six weeks. A sustainable innovation process is made up of many cycles of ideas campaigns to solve problems, generate great ideas and implement them. Because Jenni allows you to run multiple ideas campaigns simultaneously and allows managers to own and manage their campaigns, it can become the basis of a effective, sustainable innovation process that makes it easy for your firm to out-innovate the competition. And that's what innovation is all about!
The creative solution to your innovation needs