An idea management system is a centralized hub where companies collect, evaluate, and validate ideas before launching them as shippable solutions.
Historically, companies have used ad hoc tools to manage ideas. For example, they may use a Slack channel to collect ideas, a whiteboard tool to refine them, and project management software to manage validation.
While ad hoc idea management can work for companies with a small volume of ideas, enterprise companies are shifting toward centralized idea management systems with dedicated software due to three key limitations:
Departments use separate knowledge hubs, hindering cross-departmental collaboration. Employees cannot view or improve each other’s ideas, which lowers the quality of final concepts. For example, the engineering department cannot provide input on a new product idea.
Ad hoc idea collection tools don’t keep authors updated on the progress of their ideas, leading them to feel overlooked or forgotten. In our experience, this lack of transparency is the primary reason employees stop submitting ideas.
Without an idea management system for evaluating and validating ideas, companies struggle to turn ideas into valuable products, services, or processes.
By centralizing idea management within a single platform, companies source higher-quality ideas, as employees from different departments can view and collaborate on each other’s ideas.
Additionally, companies can more reliably develop ideas into tangible solutions, as the idea management solution outlines the necessary steps after ideation.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to set up an effective idea management system using our platform, InnovationCast. Along the way, we’ll cover best practices to improve the quality of ideas and increase the number of successful innovation projects.
Towards the end, we’ll review how our client, DHL, used InnovationCast to set up an idea management system in just four weeks, increasing idea submissions by 67% and implementing ideas by 14%.
Learn more about how InnovationCast can help you establish your idea management system by scheduling a 25-minute demo with our team.
Step 1: Run Innovation Challenges to Source High-Quality Ideas Relevant to Company Priorities
The first thing an idea management system must do is collect ideas from employees and outside participants that can help the company address priorities, initiatives, pain points, and goals.
However, the method by which a system sources ideas and customer feedback matters and is a determining factor behind the success of an idea management system.
A common mistake companies make when crowdsourcing ideas is creating a context-less “suggestion box” where employees can submit any idea they think of. This usually takes the form of a Slack channel, web form, or company email address.
There are three problems with this “suggestion box” approach:
Companies struggle to source ideas related to their priorities. Without clear guidance on the types of ideas needed, employees submit random topics instead of ideas aligned with the company’s priorities. For example, if a hospital’s priority is improving the patient waiting room experience, they’re unlikely to collect relevant ideas without informing employees of this focus.
Companies struggle to collect high-quality ideas. Because the ideation process doesn’t provide employees with the necessary context around the priority, they submit generic, low-effort ideas. Sticking with the waiting room example above, if employees don’t know what patients are complaining about or what has been tried before, they are more likely to submit generic ideas like “Put a TV in the waiting room.”
Companies struggle to collect ideas quickly. Because the suggestion box is always open, there’s no urgency to get involved. Employees procrastinate and say they’ll submit ideas when they have time — which often never comes. This makes it difficult for companies to collect ideas in the first place.
Instead, we’ve found that running Innovation Challenges is a great alternative to the suggestion box, as it effectively addresses these three problems.
Companies Can Align Idea Submissions with Their Priorities Using Innovation Challenges
Innovation Challenges are time-bound calls for employees and outside participants (customers, partners, and experts) to submit valuable ideas tackling specific priorities.
Innovation managers or stakeholders can create challenges that inform employees about company priorities. They can also add the necessary resources, such as customer surveys, stakeholder interviews, and market research data, to help employees understand and research the priority.
As soon as a stakeholder creates a challenge, InnovationCast notifies all employees and participants to get involved.
We encourage all of our clients to use Innovation Challenges because they solve the three problems discussed above:
The company collects ideas aligned with its priorities because employees know exactly what kinds of ideas are needed.
The company gathers high-quality, non-generic ideas, as employees have the context to understand the priority and can research before submitting their ideas.
The company collects ideas quickly because each challenge has a clear closing date.
What differentiates InnovationCast from other idea management platforms is that we offer guidance — including templates, examples, and checklists — to help gather the best ideas for each challenge. Most platforms leave users to create challenges on their own.
Additionally, as the challenge manager creates a challenge, our AI analyzes their inputs in real-time and suggests improvements, helping them avoid common pitfalls.
Furthermore, our AI analyzes respondent inputs and prompts them to enhance their ideas, resulting in higher-quality submissions.
Read more: How to Implement an Effective Idea Generation Process in Your Organization
Step 2: Display All Ideas within the Idea Management System for Everyone in the Company to See
Nearly all first draft ideas need refinement, as they are often incomplete and flawed. This is common, as idea authors rarely have the time to consider every aspect and include all necessary information.
This is why an idea management system must display ideas for all employees (and possibly outside participants) to see. This way, employees with different expertise (legal, manufacturing, IT, marketing, etc.) can collaborate with the original author to refine ideas and get them in the best condition possible.
Unfortunately, this isn’t possible for most companies because ideas are often collected across different product management and idea management tools, with no way for employees to view and contribute to all ideas. This is why a centralized system is key to successful idea management.
Keeping this in mind, InnovationCast allows companies to showcase all ideas for employees to see and collaborate on.
Improve Ideas Using the Collective Intelligence of Your Workforce with InnovationCast
When someone responds to a challenge, their submission is automatically listed in the news feed for other employees to see when they log in to their account.
To stimulate engagement, InnovationCast encourages users to review the details of an idea and share their thoughts by voting “Looks good,” “Not so good,” or “Undecided” if they need more information to make a decision.
However, the key point is that, unlike most platforms that stop after a user casts their vote, InnovationCast requires users to elaborate by asking what they like or dislike about the idea. If they are undecided, it prompts them to specify what additional information they need before making a decision.
This way, employees from all departments and with different skill sets can use their expertise to provide feedback to the original authors. They can then collaborate to refine ideas, helping companies collect high-quality ideas.
Read more: How to Encourage Innovation in the Workplace
Step 3: Establish Workflows to Structure Tasks After Ideation
Many companies collect high-quality ideas but don’t know how to turn them into beneficial products, services, and processes. This causes ideas to lay dormant.
This is a common problem since gathering ideas is generally easy. However, managing the next steps (idea evaluation, prioritization, and validation) is more complicated. Without the experience of an innovation manager skilled in handling innovation projects, it’s unlikely that someone will know how to proceed after capturing ideas.
While some companies ask the innovation department to lead innovation projects, we don’t recommend this approach. Innovation departments typically consist of only a small number of innovation managers, making it unrealistic for them to oversee every project.
Instead, we suggest the innovation department outline, step by step, the work to be completed after idea collection and share this roadmap with all departments. This way, evaluation and validation teams know what’s required of them to push an idea into implementation and aren't left to navigate the next steps on their own.
Additionally, by structuring the work that must happen after idea collection, innovation managers don’t have to lead every validation project themselves. Each department creates its own evaluation and validation teams and uses the guidance provided by the innovation department to manage innovation projects.
InnovationCast Workflows Guide Users Through Evaluation & Validation Steps
InnovationCast provides workflows outlining the next steps for evaluation and validation teams based on the idea they’re pursuing. This eliminates the need for innovation managers to define these steps, and ensures evaluation teams know exactly what to do with ideas.
Our workflows include evaluation models, business scorecards, experiments, KPIs, and minimum success criteria, all based on our 10+ years of innovation management experience. These are inspired by methodologies like Lean Startup, Customer Development, and Discovery-driven Planning.
What sets InnovationCast apart from other innovation platforms is that we offer tailored workflows for different types of ideas — such as product, process, continuous improvement, and revolutionary ideas. This allows teams to evaluate and validate ideas using workflows specifically designed for each type, rather than a generic one-size-fits-all approach.
Additionally, users can customize workflow steps to align with their company’s innovation processes by dragging, dropping, adding, and removing visual blocks — something most idea management software doesn’t allow.
Read more: Idea Validation: A Guide to Affordably Testing Ideas
Tips to Help Encourage a Culture of Innovation
Here are three best practices to encourage employees and outside participants to submit ideas and collaborate:
Educate employees on the importance of their input.
Reward employees for their contributions.
Allow employees without original ideas to participate.
Educate Employees on the Importance of Their Input
Employees often hesitate to submit ideas because they feel their contributions won’t be impactful enough or valued by the company.
Many employees assume that only groundbreaking, revolutionary ideas — like launching the next iPhone or SpaceX rocket — are of interest to the company. However, they fail to recognize that incremental improvements to existing products, services, and processes often lead to the most significant impact. Even seemingly small ideas, such as addressing process inefficiencies, can save the company thousands of dollars and improve its bottom line.
To encourage participation, it’s crucial to break down these barriers. Companies that do this effectively see the highest levels of employee engagement.
While creating educational materials and delivering them in an easy-to-digest format can be time-consuming, innovation managers likely have bigger priorities. That’s why we added educational resources to InnovationCast, which are delivered directly to employees' inboxes through an email drip campaign.
InnovationCast Comes with Training Materials Educating Employees on Innovation
InnovationCast provides educational materials, including videos, articles, and case studies, that debunk common myths about innovation. This helps companies onboard employees quickly and efficiently.
Rather than overwhelming employees with all the resources at once, we send daily emails with bite-sized content. Each email takes only one or two minutes to read, allowing employees to easily absorb the information while checking their inbox, rather than dedicating an entire day to learning about innovation.
This approach addresses a common shortcoming with most innovation management software and idea management systems — companies often don’t put enough effort into educating employees on innovation, which results in low participation rates.
Reward Employees for Their Hard Work
Another important part of encouraging participation is showing appreciation for employees’ hard work. This can be done using rewards like PTO, cash prizes, mobile phones, or anything the company chooses. In our experience, rewards are a good way to spark quick engagement, especially in the early stages of establishing an idea management system.
However, the key to an effective rewards program is rewarding employees for the quality of their ideas, not the quantity.
Too often, companies make the mistake of giving employees a prize when they reach 10 idea submissions, for example. However, this type of reward doesn’t incentivize employees to thoroughly research and brainstorm innovative ideas. Employees can submit 10 poor ideas and still get their reward.
So, when establishing a rewards system, we recommend emphasizing the quality of ideas. For example, instead of giving employees cash prizes when they submit 10 ideas, give them a cash prize when they submit an idea chosen for validation or implementation.
Reward Employees Using InnovationCast’s Badges & Rewards Feature
With InnovationCast, companies can reward employees for their hard work in three ways:
Monetary rewards: Companies can offer cash prizes, gift cards, PTO, concert tickets, or even high-value items like iPads and cars when employees submit ideas, collaborate with colleagues, or participate in validation and brainstorming sessions.
Points system: Companies can implement a points system where employees earn points for specific actions, such as submitting high-quality ideas. Employees can then redeem these points for rewards, creating a gamified experience that encourages ongoing engagement.
Revenue sharing: Companies can offer employees a percentage of the new revenue generated or savings achieved by their idea. This commission-based model often results in the highest participation levels and quality ideas due to the significant incentive. However, it may not be feasible for all companies.
When financial rewards are not an option, companies can still recognize employees for their innovative contributions in meaningful ways, such as:
Career advancement opportunities: Involvement in key decision-making or leading a team, such as a product development team.
Time-based rewards: Flexible working hours or an "Innovation Sabbatical" for personal projects.
Professional development: Access to training, certifications, or courses aligned with career growth.
Public recognition: Acknowledgement in company newsletters, on the intranet, or during all-hands meetings.
Leadership exposure: Opportunities to present ideas to senior leaders or participate in executive meetings.
Allow Employees Who Don’t Have Original Ideas to Get Involved
It’s likely that many employees aren't going to have original, high-quality ideas to share. However, sourcing insights from them remains essential, as it enables companies to draw from a broader spectrum of perspectives.
This is why companies with the most effective and vibrant idea management systems provide employees multiple ways of participating, not just conventional idea submission. One of these alternative methods is to encourage employees to share news articles, social media posts, and other resources they think are important with others inside the company.
This way, employees can surface the latest opportunities and threats, share them with everyone inside the company, and stakeholders can act quickly to address them. This centralized news sharing frequently stimulates the generation of new ideas.
Support Centralized News Sharing with InnovationCast’s Signal & Scouting Feature
With Signals & Scouting, employees share insights they believe could impact the company. This news is stored in the InnovationCast news feed for others to view upon signing in.
If certain news presents a potential opportunity or threat to the company, everyone can brainstorm ways to tackle it, leading to the creation of new ideas.
Our Signals & Scouting feature offers two key benefits:
It provides employees without original ideas an alternative way to get involved.
It keeps everyone informed with the latest competitor and industry news.
Read more: 5 Best Open Innovation Software + Reviews
DHL Established an Idea Management Process in Under 4 Weeks
DHL is a global logistics and shipping company with half a million employees, delivering nearly a billion packages annually.
Before adopting InnovationCast, DHL faced the challenge of continuing to encourage their IT department to develop innovative solutions to maintain their leadership as the world’s top logistics and shipping company.
To address this, they created IdeaHub, an idea management system built with InnovationCast. IdeaHub allowed the IT department to submit ideas on how they believed the company could improve and then use InnovationCast’s guidance to move these ideas into validation and implementation.
DHL launched IdeaHub in less than four weeks, resulting in thousands of employees submitting ideas and collaborating with colleagues. This ecosystem led to a 67% increase in idea submissions (compared to previous ad-hoc systems) and a 14% increase in implemented ideas.
Establish a Company-Wide Idea Management System & Drive Innovation with InnovationCast
Schedule a free demo with our customer success team to learn more about how InnovationCast can help manage ideas within your company.
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