How Ideas Campaigns Work

Ideas campaigns are the most effective structure for a sustainable idea management process. Learn more about how ideas campaigns work and why they should form the basis of your idea management strategy.

Let's look at each step in a little more detail. You can follow along in the illustration above (or click here to see a larger version of the illustration).

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1. Innovation Challenge

The innovation challenge is the focus of your ideas campaign - and it is worth spending time to get the challenge just right so that you get the right ideas.

Challenges are normally the result of rephrasing problems - or perhaps business needs or issue - into short, terse questions which inspire creative thinking.

Here are some examples.

Your challenge should meet these criteria..

It should be a short, terse question focused on a single issue.
"In what ways might we improve the functionality and reduce the production cost of product X?" is two good challenges - but one bad challenge. Better to create two challenges for two ideas campaigns: "In what ways might we improve the functionality of Product X?" and later, "In what ways might we reduce the production cost of Product X?"

It should not be too simple to the point of being ambigous.
"Marketing ideas" is way too ambiguous. Your colleagues will not know what you are looking for.

It should (normally) start with: "In what ways might we..?" or "How might we...?" or "What kinds of...might we...?".

It should not include background information. This is a common problem in ideas campaigns and tends to confuse participants.
"Based on our latest market research, we see that sales to middle aged women are down 12%; moreover, three focus groups indicated that our widgets are unappealing to woman over the age of 30. With this information in mind, please suggest product improvements..." - is a bad challenge. It has way too much information! "In what ways might we make our widgets more appealling to middle aged women?" is sufficient for generating good ideas.

It should not include criteria. Criteria are essential for evaluating ideas. But during the idea generation phase, you want to encourage open thinking. Criteria slow people down and encourage them to censor their ideas for fear they will not meet the criteria.
What kinds of business activities - that take advantage of low labour costs and do not demand English language skills from the work force - might we launch in China? is a poor challenge. Idea submitters will not submit ideas they fear do not meet criteria. A better challenge would be "What kinds of business activities might we launch in China?". During the evaluation phase you can work out which ideas meet your criteria as well as modify promising ideas so that they better meet your criteria.

It should not include solutions!
"How might we reduce logistics costs by outsourcing small deliveries?" is a bad challenge. It already includes a solution and will therefore discourage participants from suggesting alternative ideas for reducing logistics costs. Ask instead, "How might we reduce logistics costs?" and give your colleagues the freedom to be creative with their solutions!

Want to read more? Then, Click here to download a tutorial on how to frame an innovation challenge - PDF document: 338kb.

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2. Motivation

Once you have formulated your challenge and set up your ideas campaign, the next step is to motivate people to participate! This may seem obvious, but if you do not motivate, people will not participate. And the first step in motivation is promotion.

We will assume that you are already promoting innovation and idea management in your enterprise. Hopefully, part of this promotion is coming directly from top management. In addition, you need to promote individual ideas campaigns - particularly in the early days of your idea management activities - so that people know about each campaign and are motivated to participate.

Jenni idea management software service includes tools for e-mailing participants the details of your ideas campaigns. In addition, posters, news on the Intranet and announcements in divisional meetings can also help promote ideas campaigns.

Be sure your promotion also motivates. It's one thing to let people know about your ideas campaign and quite another to get them to share and collaborate on ideas. Recognition, rewards schemes and knowing that ideas will be implemented are all effective methods for motivating people to participate.

Rewards

Rewards are a key motivational tool. They need not be big. Indeed, big rewards are often less effective than small rewards. Rewards might be recognition based or small gifts for every idea. Alternatively, rewarding the most creative ideas encourages creative thinking in your ideas campaign. Whatever rewards choice you make, be sure your colleagues know about it. Rewards are one of the biggest motivators for participating in an ideas campaign. Click here for more information about rewarding innovation.

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3. Collaborative Idea Development

Once the innovation challenge has been formulated and the ideas campaign launched, it is time to generate ideas. Participants submit ideas and collaborate on each others' ideas in an open, transparent environment.

During the collaborative idea development phase, feedback should be positive and participants should be encouraged to push their ideas further. Criticism must be prohibited. Such a positive environment is essential to the incubation of creative ideas - and it is creative ideas that turn into your most significant innovations. Negative feedback is discouraging not only to the recipient of the feedback, but also to other participants. And as soon as people fear their ideas will be criticised, they quickly stop being creative.

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4. Evaluation

Now it is time to evaluate ideas in order to determine which offer the most potential to your organisation.

An evaluation matrix is an ideal initial evaluation tool. It includes a set of criteria (five is best in our experience) against which each promising idea can be measured. The better the idea meets each criterion, the higher its score. When a set of ideas is evaluated by a team of experts, you get a detailed scorecard of the best ideas.

Following the evaluation matrix, you may wish to have experts prepare more detailed SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunity, threat) analyses for marketing and new product ideas - as this will provide a more detailed picture of each idea's market potential.

Ideas which pass these initial evaluation 'gates' can then move on to more formal idea implementation processes such as business case development, project initiation, prototype development and similar.

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5. Implementation

After the ideas campaign, it is important to implement the creative ideas you generate. After all, creativity does not become innovation until the ideas have been implemented. Unfortunately, many organisations go to great trouble and expense to generate and evaluate ideas, but then fail to implement them! This is a very inefficient exercise in idea management and one to be avoided! For help in implementing innovative ideas, read our Creative Idea Implementation Plan here.

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The Big Picture

Although each ideas campaign is a single event lasting about two months - from framing the innovation challenge to completing the evaluation process - campaigns can be combined to form a sustainable and integrated idea management process.

Jenni allows you to empower managers to set up and manage their own ideas campaigns, thus each division can take charge of its own innovation and you can even have multiple ideas campaigns running simultaneously.

In addition, new ideas campaigns can build upon the results of previous ideas campaigns. For instance, you might run an ideas campaign about new product ideas. Once you have completed that campaign and have one or more innovative new product ideas to develop, you will probably want to run additional ideas campaigns about how to build the product, what features to add, packaging, marketing and other aspects of product development and marketing.

Compared to suggestion schemes which are open to all ideas, ideas campaigns offer numerous advantages:

• Ideas focus on your current business needs

• Innovation challenges motivate creative thinking and facilitate collaborative idea development

• Evaluations compare multiple solutions to the same problem, thus ensuring you find the best solutions

• Reporting is more structured

• Because ideas campaigns are archived afterwards, you do not end up with a suggestion box full of unevaluated ideas.

In short, the ideas campaign is the most effective structure for any innovation initiative. That's why Jenni idea management is designed to facilitate your ideas campaigns.

For more information or to arrange a demonstration of Jenni, contact us today.