- [Narrator] The Hall of Regrettable Quotes.
(wolf howling) (rain pouring)
(thunder crashing)
(evil cackling)
(rain pouring)
(door creaking)
- "This telephone has too many many shortcomings
to be seriously considered a means of communication.
(phone ringing)
The device is inherently of no value to us."
1876, internal memo, Western Union.
"I do not believe the introduction
of motorcars will ever affect the riding of horses."
Mr. Scott-Montagu, MP in the UK, 1903.
"Who the hell wants to hear movies with people talking?"
H.M. Warner of Warner Brothers
when rejecting a proposal for a film with sound in 1927.
"Yes, the concept is interesting and well-formed,
but in order to earn better than a C,
the idea must be feasible."
Fred Smith's Yale Professor,
regarding his paper proposing an overnight delivery service.
Fred would go on to create FedEx.
"There's no reason anyone
would want a computer in their home."
Ken Olsen, president, chairman
and founder of Digital Equipment Corporation in 1977.
(playful dramatic music)
They say hindsight's 20/20,
and it's easy to call out shortsightedness
after the fact but at the time,
those opinions were formed
with what all their market research
and practical experience told them.
I mean, didn't even Bill Gates say 640K memory
should be enough for anybody?
Well, no, he didn't,
at least according to Bill Gates himself
in a 1996 news column.
His defense, "No-one involved in computers
would ever say that a certain amount
of memory is enough for all time."
But I digress.
Usually our organizations are focused
on efficiency and standardization.
And this tends to disincentivize anything
out of the ordinary.
New ideas can be faced with a gauntlet of challenges,
giving it an organizational flywheel
that's just not optimized for different ideas.
Last episode, we talked
about an innovation management process,
which starts with ideas.
This episode is on idea management.
How do we collect 'em? How do we sort 'em?
How do we prioritize 'em?
What sorts of expectations and messaging
should we provide?
Let's see what wisdom our favorite corporate trainer
has to say on this topic.
(tape whirring)
(upbeat music)
- Hi, I'm Marty McMasterson.
And welcome to another episode
of "That's Innovation!"
Idea management.
It's one of the most important inputs
in our innovation process,
and an idea management system
is how we can collect, track
and manage those ideas.
Let's talk about some components
of an idea management system.
First, we'll want some way to record
and keep track of our ideas.
It's great to have creative jam sessions
but unless we write these things down,
it's all just dust in the wind.
(Marty huffing) (Marty coughing)
Next, we'll want some way
to evaluate and prioritize these ideas
so we can focus our efforts.
Some things to think about
when prioritizing ideas are:
Does this idea align with our chosen innovation strategy?
This can be as broad as routine innovation
versus radical innovation
or as specific as an individual challenge or pain point.
Can this idea be handled
through an existing process or workflow?
For example, if someone had the idea
of free break dancing lessons for all employees,
that's more of an employee benefit request.
(upbeat music)
I'm all for some righteous popping and locking
but that wouldn't require an innovation process.
Is this idea actionable?
If not, maybe it needs more clarification.
Is this idea feasible?
Can we realistically do this thing?
Now, do be careful on this one
as many innovations may seem impossible at first.
At this point,
we should also identify roles and responsibilities.
Someone or a group of people will have the job
of deciding which ideas warrant further work.
Actually doing the evaluation
and prioritization we just talked about.
Once an idea is selected,
someone will actually have to dig into that idea
and do the work, like research, prototyping and mock-ups.
It's good to put names in boxes here
so everyone knows their part.
Last but not least, we need ideas.
They can be an improvement
over something we're already doing,
routine innovation or maybe something totally new to us.
Many people have lots of ideas
just based on their own experiences.
And there are many techniques and tools we can use
to generate ideas.
Hey, I've got a great idea.
How about we cover those in our next episode?
(upbeat music)
(tape whirring) (lightning crashing)
(upbeat music)
- Ideas are the fuel that helps run our innovation engine.
Now, an idea management system
is much more than just a suggestion box.
On the other hand,
it doesn't have to be a heavy process.
You can start with a simple DIY web form.
Here are some components that I like to include
in an idea management system.
First, I want there to be a really low barrier
to entry for new ideas.
If your idea entry form reads like a mortgage application,
people just aren't going to bother.
Plus, at the early stages,
an idea is just an idea.
The innovation process will help it mature
and fill in the blanks later.
It's just too early for financial justification
or go-to-market strategies.
This is where many innovation initiatives get started off
on the wrong foot.
Building an intake form
that tries to take in too much data upfront.
Keep it simple.
I'd rather have a flood of ideas than no ideas.
If you can, set some expectations
with idea submitters on what will happen with their idea.
In the last episode,
we talked about building our innovation process.
And you can use this process
to show how ideas might progress.
If people think their idea just went
into some mysterious black hole,
they'll be less likely to part
with their inspiration.
I like to make a running list of ideas available to all.
Well, maybe not publicly available
if we're collecting internal ideas
but being able to read other people's ideas
might inspire more ideas.
(lively music)
We are going to create a simple idea management system.
Now, there are many ways you can do this online.
There are some services that specialize
in this sort of thing and charge a subscription.
This one is free if you happen to have a Google account.
To start, we're gonna go out to forms.google.com.
Click the plus and that creates our first form.
We're gonna title this one Great Idea Collection System.
We're gonna give it a little description here.
Now we're ready to create question one,
and it's gonna be really simple.
What is your great idea?
Google Forms tries to predict the type of question this is
and recommends a response format.
In this case, paragraph is the one we want.
We'll add another question.
Who are you?
And short answer works for this response.
Now, we can add all sorts of question types,
but I like to keep it as simple and fast as possible.
I'll add one more just for demo purposes.
We'll use a linear scale for level of difficulty.
Now, this really isn't a great question
for an idea collection system
as difficulty is a relative term.
What might seem impossible to one person
may be really easy for another person
with different skills.
Now, let's get a preview of our collection form.
It looks like everything's working
and we can submit our preview.
And we'll see it pop up in the Responses area.
We'll just delete that test one.
Now we can send our survey to others.
We can do it via email,
a link or embedded HTML on a web page.
Looks like we can also sent it via Twitter or Facebook
but I haven't tried that.
I'm just gonna send this it myself.
If I check my email, sure enough,
I have an invitation to fill out a survey.
I click on the link and it takes me to the form.
My idea: Pizza every Friday
because I love pizza.
I'm Scott and this should be pretty easy.
I can submit another idea.
Tacos every Tuesday.
I'm still Scott and I'll make this medium difficulty
as it's sometimes hard to find a good place for tacos.
If we go back to our survey,
we can see we have two responses.
Both responses were submitted by me.
We can also review the submissions by question
or we can review the responses individually.
We can export the results to a Google Sheet,
which can then be exported to Excel if we wanted.
We can also turn the survey off
and not accept any new responses.
And that is using Google Forms
to create a simple idea collection management system.
(lively music) (frame creaking)
Now, once we have collected some ideas,
now it's time to down select and prioritize them.
As a first pass, let's go through the ideas
and filter out those that aren't really fit
for our innovation process.
Some ideas will be outside of our scope of control,
so these should be closed out
or maybe passed to some other part of the organization
that might be able to evaluate it.
Some ideas are bound to be process improvements,
which might be best handled
through a Kaizen Teian program.
Or maybe some other existing
continuous improvement initiative.
The intent here is to get a subset of ideas
that's easier to work with.
Now, there are many ways to prioritize and select ideas
that look most promising.
Voting, consensus, Delphi method.
These are three possibilities.
You could just ask an executive to select ideas,
a sort of executive decree but be careful here.
If executive decree is used,
that might cause people to hold on
to a failing innovation project longer than they should
just because they don't wanna disappoint the executive.
Plus, being an executive doesn't necessarily mean well,
for this point, I'm gonna refer you back
to the Hall of Regrettable Quotes,
if you know what I mean.
The method I prefer to use
is a weighted criteria ranking.
It's pretty simple to create and incorporates both objective
and subjective components.
First, we come up with some attributes of innovation.
Then we create some levels for those attributes.
Now, since every attribute probably
isn't gonna be considered equal,
we add some weights.
We can use these weights to reward those ideas
that are best aligned with our innovation strategy.
We can then evaluate our ideas
through this lens of the criteria,
and that will yield a numeric value.
If we've done things right,
the higher the value, the more in line
with our innovation strategy the idea will rank.
I'll link to a sample weighted criteria template
in the resources for this episode.
(lively music) (frame creaking)
All right, all you innovators, here's your homework.
How might you structure an idea management system?
How would you collect ideas?
Maybe you can include some form of gamification,
like a leaderboard or other incentives.
How might you decide what ideas progress
into your innovation process?
If you're gonna try a weighted criteria method,
what sorts of attributes and weights might you use?
Go ahead and give it a go.
With a strategy and innovation process,
and an idea management process all in hand,
we are making some good progress.
If you feel so inclined,
share what you've come up with
in the comments below,
or maybe reach out for some inspiration.
Plus, if there's a particular innovation topic
or challenge you'd like us to cover
in an upcoming episode, let us know.
(lively music) (frame creaking)
Now, just setting up an idea collection web form
might bring in some ideas
but sometimes, you might need to grease the wheels,
so to speak.
In the next episode, we're gonna cover some tools
and techniques you can use to inspire creativity,
and start thinking about things in different ways.
Thanks for watching.
I'm Scott Pletcher.
- And "That's Innovation!"