Idea Generation Process: The Various Approaches to Gathering & Implementing Employee Ideas

Employee ideas are the backbone of any corporate innovation initiative, which makes a strong idea generation process that can scale across your organization essential. Your employees’ ideas have the potential to create long-term impact across several areas of the business, including:

• New products.
• New services.
• Process improvements.
• Operational efficiencies.
• Competitive advantage.

To realize this potential, your idea generation process must be carefully tailored to your organization’s culture and needs. It should also fit seamlessly within existing ways of working to encourage employee participation and adoption.

In this blog, we’ll define the key steps of an effective idea generation process and explore different approaches organizations can use to maximize idea submissions, strengthen engagement, and ultimately move more valuable ideas toward implementation.

Defining Your Idea Generation Process

The key steps in a traditional idea generation process follow a set path; submission, collaboration, evaluation, and implementation. However, there are various approaches for each step of the process which can be chosen based on what is best for your business and employees.

1. Submission

Asking the Right Questions

Before the digital age, ideas were mostly shared through physical suggestion boxes. Often these were under used and under promoted, rarely achieving large-scale innovation due to a lack of structure and focus.

Arguably the submission phase is the most important step of the process. This is where your employees will submit their ideas and kick off the innovation process. During this step it is important to make the process as engaging as possible, as well as align it to your overall business goals.

Ideation is most successful when it is focused on the challenges that your organization is facing and/or around your business goals and strategy. Asking the right questions at the right time can provide you with the answers to overcome business challenges, and set you on the path towards achieving your business goals.

As well as deciding on the best topic for your organization to tackle, it is key to learn how to position your questions. If your idea challenge is very detailed and asks many specific questions, you will get less ideas, but they will be of higher quality. If your idea challenge is vague or lacking in detail, you may receive many ideas but of poorer quality.

Provide a Structure

Idea management tools are useful for providing a formal submission process through an idea submission form. When this process is properly communicated and promoted across the business, employees have an easily accessible way to share their ideas and contribute to the wider idea generation process.

A structured submission process can help organizations:

1. Make it easier for employees to submit ideas.
2. Gather relevant information in a consistent format.
3. Keep employee ideas focused on specific business challenges.

Companies such as Amazon recognize the importance of providing employees with a formal idea generation process, including its PRFAQ approach, which encourages employees to identify problems and develop new solutions.

With any formal process, it is important to fine tune the approach so it remains efficient and relevant to your business and its challenges. Idea management tools allow you to customize submission forms, helping you pinpoint exactly what you need from employees while maintaining focus throughout the idea generation process.

2. Collaboration

Once an idea is submitted there is still a long way to go before it is implemented. An important part of the idea generation process is to have your employees collaborate to grow and shape an idea to boost its chance of implementation.

Shaping the Idea Through Discussion

Idea management tools facilitate online collaboration, which is especially important for remote and distributed teams. Collaboration features such as commenting and voting can also be gamified to encourage engagement. For example, a points system can allow users to earn points and, if the business chooses, receive rewards for their collaborative efforts.

Comments can help guide and develop an idea as it moves through the idea generation process. Features such as voting can also be used as a rule to determine whether an idea reaches the next stage.

For instance, if an idea receives a certain number of upvotes, it can automatically progress along the workflow. This helps organizations use employee input to identify promising ideas and move them through the idea generation process more efficiently.

Create Teams Around an Idea

Another way to facilitate collaboration is to create teams with specifically chosen members who can work together to develop an idea or brainstorm new ideas. Selecting the right team members can bring together:

• Different perspectives.
• Relevant experience.
• Specialist knowledge.

These teams can help shape and strengthen ideas as they move through the idea generation process, drawing on the knowledge and expertise needed to develop them further.

Once an idea has been developed through collaboration, the next stage is to have the right people evaluate whether it is viable for implementation. This involves reviewing idea submissions to identify those that are most relevant and have the greatest potential to solve your organization’s challenge.

3. Evaluation

With an idea management tool, you can set up an expert review as part of your idea generation process. On Qmarkets’ Q-ideate platform, expert review includes evaluation methods such as scorecards and token voting.

Usually, idea submissions will give you a rough indication of an idea’s potential value, how long it could take to implement, and the resources required. During the evaluation phase, experts can dive deeper into the details and make more informed estimates about the idea’s potential.

Functionality such as Qmarkets’ expert review provides an important step for further analysis. As ideas are evaluated, initial submission questions may expand into more detailed sub-questions, helping experts gather the information they need to determine whether an idea is valuable and viable.

Shark Tank /Judges Panel

For organizations that want to include gamification in their idea generation process, organizing a Shark Tank event or judges panel can be an interactive and engaging way to evaluate ideas.

A Shark Tank or judges panel involves employees pitching their ideas to a panel of company experts who evaluate their potential. These events can support the idea generation process by:

1. Giving employees a clear opportunity to present and develop their ideas.
2. Helping to generate engagement around innovation initiatives.
3. Supporting a stronger culture of innovation.

One Qmarkets client, a multinational food and drink corporation, took its Shark Tank event even further by creating a TV show to be screened internally. This helped promote the initiative while giving employees a unique incentive to get involved.

These idea evaluation events allow ideation to become more than a data-led process. They provide an engaging way to promote your innovation initiative, evaluate promising ideas, and encourage further employee participation.

4. Implementation

At this stage you will now have a shortlist of ideas that present real opportunity for your business and present solutions to your challenges. So is it time to dive even further into the idea and plan for its implementation.

Building a Business Case

At this stage, it is good practice to build a business case for the idea, to clearly outline what the it aims to achieve and why it is needed in business terms. Budgets, time, resources, and codependences will need to be considered, as well as a risk assessment to ensure thorough analysis. After which, you should now have everything you need to secure internal approval for turning your idea into a reality.

Proof of Concept

‘A proof of concept (POC) is an exercise in which work is focused on determining whether an idea can be turned into a reality (and) to verify that the idea will function as envisioned’.

Here organizations should create a prototype to test the idea’s functionality, design, and achievability, with an incubation period to help guide your company to full implementation.

The POC should give decision makers an insight what the idea will look like once fully implemented and deployed.

This graph shows a proof of concept framework that can be adopted when developing an idea.

Deploy and Expand

If the idea has been deemed viable and the prototype has been successful, the idea can move toward full implementation. At this stage of the idea generation process, a project management team will be required, along with the involvement of relevant departments such as R&D.

As the idea moves through implementation, it can be tweaked, adjusted, and developed further as more experts across your organization become involved. This input can help refine the idea and address issues that emerge during deployment.

Once an idea has been deployed, organizations should not see this as a reason to stop improving it. Innovation is a continuous process, and you may want to reach out to employees for further ideas on different aspects of the final product, service, or solution.

Which Approach is Right for My Company?

Ultimately, this idea generation process should be seen as a guide, not a strict route. Every innovation initiative is different, so the process should be adapted to your requirements, audience, and objectives. For example, a confidential topic may not require an open discussion phase, while a technical challenge may need a more detailed submission stage.

Key Takeaways

• Adapt your idea generation process to your organization’s specific needs.
• Customize individual stages based on the challenge and audience.
• Use flexible technology that can evolve with your innovation program.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to idea generation. The Qmarkets Q-ideate platform provides configurable workflows that allow organizations to customize each stage of the idea generation process according to their needs.

Whether you want a simple best-practice approach or a process tailored to your organization, Q-ideate provides the flexibility to support your goals and help turn employee ideas into measurable results.

To find out how more on how Qmarkets can help you gather and implement groundbreaking ideas, contact us today for more information, or to request a free product demo.