What do you imagine by the term idea management? A suggestion system, or idea management, is a significant point within your company. It is a way of generating ideas that enables all company members to make suggestions for improvements or operational processes.
Due to improved technology and increased possibilities to generate and duplicate information, many organizations have a so-called knowledge management framework. This is nothing more than a knowledge management system that helps the company organize content in the form of collected ideas and suggestions for improvement.
We will show you which areas idea management covers, what you should pay attention to when implementing the ideation process inside your team and how you can specifically incorporate idea generation with Falcon into your organizational process.
What is idea management?
Idea management allows you to involve your team in generating ideas to optimize your company profile. Various means can be used to record the suggestions and ideas. Depending on the organization, you can use feedback forms, survey tools, or similar business software. Overall, the employee suggestion system includes any idea that serves to optimize processes, save resources or optimize the entire internal process.
What are the benefits of idea management and what is it used for?
On the one hand, idea management in your organization ensures increased motivation within the workforce and encourages them to be a significant, if not the most important, part of your company. Use this knowledge for the continuous development of your organization! Colleagues who are significantly involved in the process and work in and with it on a daily basis often have a different view on things compared to the management level. On the other hand, this way you generate practical ideas, which have a higher relation to your company goals. In addition, there is a lower financial outlay and increased loyalty to the organization. You can close time windows through knowledge management and generate valuable optimization suggestions and ideas for improvement or innovation inside your team.
The use of idea management and ideation strategy can take place in many, almost all departments of the organization. It is important to clearly define the department in which you want to generate knowledge. Frequently, ideas for improvement or new innovation strategy are sought in product or process optimization, as there is almost always potential for improvement in this department in particular, which has an enormous impact on the organization's success. Suggestions for resource management, scheduling or savings can also bring significant (not only financial) benefits. If you are in a particularly competitive industry, the control of your internal processes is also a significant point, which can be optimized by the knowledge of your team members. By planning and controlling your processes, you can stay one step ahead of the competition and increase your company's success.
What difficulties can arise from employee involvement in the ideation strategy?
It is important that you develop a sensible idea management process in order to be able to implement your idea management effectively within the different departments of your organization. However, some difficulties can arise due to the involvement of employees, which must be taken into account already during the process design in order to keep them as low as possible or even prevent them. Most of the time, problems do not arise during the reception of the ideas, but more likely in the following step, theidea implementation. Employees can lose motivation if they see that the implementation process does not work and the realization of their initial ideas stalls. That is why the right software for your idea management is enormously important. In addition, participants often face a blockade because they are already used to existing processes and find it difficult to think "out of the box". Here you can provide incentives or throw specific areas like sales, production, etc. into the room. Make sure you have a suitable tool for recording and evaluating the individual ideas to keep the organizational effort low and save time.
How do you organize effective idea management?
Organization is the be-all and end-all of idea management in the business context. Here, you ensure that no ideas fall by the wayside and that all suggestions are taken on board in the ideation process. Get support from other people here to be able to assign and evaluate ideas received promptly. It is important that you inform all participating employees in advance and, if necessary, communicate delimitations with regard to the departments and the time period for gathering ideas. You can use various methods for gathering ideas. Most of the time, you work with internal virtual programs, which simplify the evaluation, development and implementation of an idea enormously. Across the board, you can adhere to the following three steps for organization:
1. Acquisition
This is where data entry takes place. Information is gathered and presented in a uniform way.
2. Organization
Ideas are filtered, categorized, and assigned to appropriate departments and the people working in them.
3. Implementation
Proposals are refined and put into a time structure. Key dates such as kick off, duration, participants (all the people involved) and budget are determined and implementation is initiated.
Idea management with Falcon
By harnessing the potential of ideas suggested by employees, you can secure significant competitive advantages. However, the process of idea management must be optimally integrated into your business in order to lead to effective results and to be able to implement and execute every idea. Falcon offers you an optimal solution and supports you from initial idea generation to implementation, thus improving your corporate strategy.
We show you how to achieve a successful ideation system in 5 steps with Falcon:
Step 1: Make the submission phase easy
The most important step of the whole process, is the submission of ideas. Here you can easily create a program for your employees in Falcon, which is structured into individual packages, such as sales, production, sustainability, or similar. Now you implement your employees so that they can work in the corresponding categories. Here it is possible for you to reveal or block areas for each employee individually.
Step 2: Making the goals tangible
Here you define a suitable KPI structure to be able to evaluate and assess ideas and suggestions in terms of their duration or effort. Idea providers can specify here which areas the idea will pay off. In Falcon, you can easily use P&L constructs here and replace them with appropriate KPIs.
Step 3: Create status as standard:
Subsequent to the idea submission or ideation phase, there is often a long road to realization. Projects that have been started often fall by the wayside or get lost. This is prevented by defining workflows and respective phases in Falcon. Establish a workflow for your proposal / ideation process. It is easy to see in which phase the implementation is. This way, the realization of the respective ideas can be quickly picked up again.
Step 4: Kickoff, reporting cycle and reporting!
The further development and elaboration of ideas is an essential part of the suggestion system. Create a kickoff for this, which picks up all participants and defines the work in the system. The resulting project cycle helps your team to work routinely. If all ideas are gathered and recorded in Falcon, you can perform successful reporting with just one click.
Step 5: Constant work in the cycle
You have established all the key ingredients for the ideation / suggestion process. Now you need to maintain this process and keep it going. The idea becomes a measure and can be drag'n dropped into an implementation-oriented program.
Carrying out these steps enables you to effectively generate and implement suggestions with Falcon as your company's idea management software.
On the basis of this article you could gain deeper insights into idea management as well as why it makes sense to use it and how you can use Falcon for effective idea management.
Do you also want to make idea management a part of your company's strategy? Then download our resource about idea management with Falcon now and implement centralized knowledge management!
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