Shaping Network Society

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I agree wholeheartedly … ideation platforms are both extremely important and very poorly understood, in our experience. We worked with a major insurance company on trying to process the results of an internal ideation campaign (what do you do with 3,000 ideas?) and talked to several other innovation officers and “idea managers” about their programs.

Some major problems: unclear agenda in asking for ideas, so the results were not in sync with the goals of the program; no methodology or staff to process the ideas in a meaningful way; no methodology for combining and evolving similar or nascent ideas into useful strategies; no adequate mechanism inside the organization for connecting useful strategies to the people/authority needed to implement them; little respect within the operational parts of the organization for the entire program.

As a result, the programs became more of an empty marketing effort; even as marketing, they could become problematic because people expected their ideas to be listened to, so lack of progress was embarrassing.

Nevertheless, I still feel that ideation platforms and programs can be extremely valuable and a fundamental advance in innovation. The challenge is perhaps much more on the organizational side in terms of how to deal with ideas in general. And that's a longer discussion!

What are company's doing to collect the knowledge and ideas of there employees, what are they doing for a company wide communication? During my work for a big global IT player, I never heard about such a company wide Ideation Platform or something similar to what John described. We used MS Sharepoint for collaboration, we used Jabber for messenger communication and hundreds of specific solutions, who were typically established within a organisation unit. Do to that, the IT-costs per employee were really high. Nevertheless, nobody was able to put in his ideas or knowledge into processes of other units. But a company wide established Ideation-Platform could be valuable for the internal communication, collaboration, knowledge transfer and knowledge archiving. Potentially something more than collecting ideas. But there is a major difference between company's and governmental organisations. The transparency. That´s nothing a company wants to establish. Company information and processes are normally kept secret. That's the reason why employees of specific units are not able to take part on most processes of other units.

There has been a big push in corporations over the last decade towards innovation in general, and in the last few years various web 2.0 and crowdsourcing concepts have been added to that mix. Although there are many silos in big companies, and a general attitude of ownership around ideas and IP, there has also been a movement to open up collaboration between divisions, with customers, and with the general public. There are a bunch of visibly successful examples of this, and a lot of less visible and successful attempts.

Off the cuff, perhaps the biggest difference is not between governments and private sector organizations, but between collaboration and transparency. Ideation is about collaboration, not just the visibility of data and processes.

The other thing I've been asking myself, mainly from the point of view of implementator, is how soon this can REALLY take off. Basically, as long as there is no broadly available software to use for this, the barriers to entry into this “hype” are too high. Currently the only platforms are either commercial, hosted and english, or self-programmed. I think this can really take off as soon as we see the first truly open source ideation platforms pop up on the net. Then you'll see the odd municipality using it, countries all over the world, and so on

That's interesting. I had thought of the platforms as being pretty common, but you're right, they are commercial, hosted and english. But an open source version shouldn't be that difficult. Perhaps we (http://www.learningworldsinstitute.org) can do some research and see if there's an easy path, perhaps based on an existing CMS platform. We created a tool to tag ideas on top of Drupal.

Ideas are a wonderful thing….they stimulate new action. And new action is progress.

Sometimes, tho', the inventors of the platforms are not prepared for ideas that are different than their own, so there is some level of fear that can sometimes impede a project from reaching a successful outcome. Leaders who would like to use ideation platforms must consider the human component and must be willing to accept a free-er forum for dialog than what they might otherwise be used to.