Idea Management

An Industry Insight by Paul Pluschkell of Spigit

Paul Pluschkell explains how idea management is changing innovation in business.

“The enterprise of the future will need to incorporate idea management tools to gain insight and feedback.”
-Paul Pluschkell, CEO and Founder of Spigit

The speed and scale of customer conversations are redirecting entire markets. The need for every employee to reach their customers has never been more critical to a company’s success. Consumers no longer make purchasing decisions based upon a company’s product information or a sales person’s pitch; instead they rely on a community of connected friends, online reviews and a plethora of real time information including price, features and benefits that is available all day and night on any device. 

Too often firms don’t take the steps required to innovate because they want to protect their existing current offerings and do not have the right tools to engage their customers. Companies seal their fate by doing just enough to get by. Fear of changing the status quo can be paralyzing, but if you are not moving forward and innovating in today’s challenging economic environment, it’s catastrophic and can lead to extinction.

Transparency

Equally important is a firm’s willingness to embrace transparency. Too many employees are not connected directly to their customers or coworkers. Companies need to embrace new technologies that connect employees, customers and partners to increase productivity and improve brand loyalty.

So how can organizations avoid complacency and turn fear into a catalyst for innovation? There are an increasing number of tools that help us stay connected with one another in our social relationships while at the same time enhance our ability to immediately share experiences, thoughts, and ideas. In comparison, most organizations are extremely inefficient at sharing ideas, experiences and knowledge between their employees and customers, leaving this extensive knowledge base totally untapped. An organization’s employees and customers are an extremely important resource for innovation, and learning how to leverage their knowledge and expertise can reap huge rewards for everyone involved.

Idea management

Enterprise social software provides the incentive and structure for automating the innovation pipeline on a large scale. Call it ‘workflow for the collective imagination’. Unlike, first- and second- generation social software tools, idea management platforms are comprehensive, blending the best elements of wikis, blogs, predictive markets, and surveys into a unified platform. Underlying algorithms allow idea management platforms to automatically rank user contributions based on their value to the organization – not solely on popular opinion. Those same algorithms automatically identify the most important contributors, feeding that information back into the evaluation of new ideas. Think Google’s PageRank for innovation, but now with a reputation rating created for all facets of the idea-management process.

Finally, idea management platforms transform corporate reward systems by introducing micro-rewards. Normally, corporate reward systems can only track an employee’s contribution over a period of time, or in the service of large projects. Tracking, evaluating and rewarding individual contributions becomes impossible for a large company. As a result, employees don’t see a hard return on their ‘small’ but valuable effort. With idea management platforms, organizations can reward for each contribution to the company. Post a better blog, and see a correspondingly better reward. Add a more insightful comment, earn more cash. Tying reward to contribution turns idea generation from an abstract process into a concrete value with a tangible payoff.

Insight and feedback

In short, the enterprise of the future will need to incorporate idea management tools to gain insight and feedback from their customers, employees and partners. These tools should strike a balance of driving bottom line growth and improving customer loyalty.

Customer and partner needs are constantly changing, and companies need to innovate faster than ever. More importantly, with hundreds, thousands and potentially millions of conversations, how do you filter through the noise to find meaningful suggestions without getting bogged down in an expensive and time-consuming evaluation process? IdeaSpigit is the social productivity software solution for companies looking to capitalize on feedback outside of their organization from customers and partners. IdeaSpigit’s combination of brainstorming, social networks, Wall Street, your favorite blogs, market economics, election politics and academic reviewed journals is going to change the way we innovate in the enterprise.