What is idea management
As per Gartner, idea management is a structured process of collecting outstanding ideas, identifying the best, sorting invaluable insights, and executing them within the business processes of the organization. Ideas come in many forms such as customer feedback, feature requests, problems or product suggestions. Managing these ideas requires maintaining a backlog. With this backlog you can identify your best ideas and work further on it. Effective idea management is the outcome of simplifying for the entire team to contribute to the future of the product.
The difference between idea management and innovation management
Since both innovation management and idea management are central to the innovation process, many people usually mix them up. The truth is that they are quite different from each other.
Why idea management
The main goal of idea management is to generate the best ideas possible to support the innovation process and help the organization fulfill its business and innovation goals. It may not be a challenge for most people to manage a couple of ideas. But we are talking about thousands of good ones here, which would make management almost impossible if you do it without the help of technology.
To put it simply, innovation management is the process of managing the overall innovation process. It concerns portfolio management, innovation project management, innovation dashboards, and reporting. Yes, it also involves idea management. This is the root of the confusion. But when you look at the bigger picture, idea management is only one of the processes involved in innovation management.
Idea Management in Accept Mission
In Accept Mission, Idea management is the process of sharing ideas, reviewing and collaborating on ideas (capturing feedback, working on concepts) and selecting the best ideas to develop as next innovation project. By using the "collect" missions you can fill your idea pipeline (IDEAS)
IDEAS pipeline explained
In Accept Mission our tool IDEAS is your idea pipeline. IDEAS shows a consolidated long list of all your ideas collected with Ideas box, ideation and boards missions. With IDEAS you can analyse, review, add scores, compare, search, sort and filter out the best ideas. With the kanban view you can monitor the progress and status of idea cards. In the Accept Mission settings you edit your idea management workflow (kanban gates).
Idea review gates explained
When it comes to decision making, Innovation teams should only select the best ideas (with the highest impact / score / priority) to execute, implement or develop as next big innovation project. We therefore recommend you to follow this 3 gate review approach. By following this approach only the best ideas will stand out from the rest and it will be a peace of cake for you to fill your innovation roadmap (portfolio) with only high priority, high impact validated ideas. Read more about how to collect feedback form peers, experts and stakeholders here
