The document discusses ways to improve the success of ideation events through a formalized ideation process. Some key points: 1. A formal ideation process with defined roles, stages, and thresholds can help ensure ideas are generated and implemented. It should align with the organization's innovation process. 2. Effective project management is needed to derive value from good ideas by commercializing them through task assignment, progress tracking, and communication. 3. Rewards and recognition, as well as strong leadership support and commitment, can drive employee engagement in ideation. Innovation time-offs for employees can also foster creativity.

1. Revealed: Recipe for Successful Ideation
By Ankit Agarwal

2. “I start with an idea and then it turns into something else.”
- Pablo Picasso
Innovation is indispensable for
organisations to grow and thrive and
ideas are the backbone of innovation.
The importance of creativity and new
ideas has never been so discerning and
recognized. A formalized ideation is
widely accepted form of innovation
process that plays a key role in
serendipitous discovery of ideas,
cognitive and collaborative interaction
between people, personal and
professional motivation and emotional
engagement.
Not surprisingly, technology has become
the critical edge to innovate faster and
demonstrate greater agility than the
competition. However, the organizations
need to understand the method to
exploit technology and kick-start
Innovation. A recent MIT Sloan Survey
found that a top issue facing businesses
today is stagnant or slow-growing
revenue, often the consequence of the
company’s lack of adaptability or
inability to dive into the realm of
Innovation. To support these efforts,
businesses are looking toward managing
the innovation process and stimulating
more collaboration and engagement
among employees, customers and
partners through events like Ideation.. Channelized and managed ideation can
help transforming ideas into marketable
goods and services giving a competitive
advantage to organisations triggering
exponential growth. Any misalignment
or undermining of innovation process
could, however, hinder organization’s
growth.

3. Defining Ideation
“Ideation is the process of creating new ideas (Wikipedia)”. Etymologically, we see that words ending in “-
ation” typically describe a process, and the root of “ideation” is “idea.” So it’s about a process for soliciting
ideas and transforming the best ones into marvels. Thus, to me, what used to be called “brainstorming”
now seems to be termed as “ideation” just like selling an old wine in a new bottle.
In simple terms, Ideation is all about
accumulating ideas. It can be from
Employees, Internal stakeholders like
Marketing/Sales/Support,
Partners/Vendors, Customer/Client
and/or Social Media. By intelligently
leveraging crowds and communities,
teams can further garner unique and
innovative ideas. Businesses are also
able to engage with outside experts,
such as customers, suppliers and
partners, to collaborate on ideas and
contribute feedback from additional
relevant viewpoints.

4. Ideation Approaches
There are three major approaches to Ideation –
1. Open Ideation- This is an on-going process wherein anyone can submit any idea at any time
through Ideation platform/social network tool etcetera. This is the most viable and thoughtful
approach to Innovation because creativity can never be time-bound. While creativity can be
stimulated, it has some limitations. An idea originates from the innate creativity and curiosity of
human mind. Ideas most often originate from what an individual (or a Team) is actually working on
and, therefore, what they naturally think about or relate to work. Undoubtedly, technology and
product areas do determine creative potential, however, most of the times its sheer serendipity or
spontaneity. Ideas, that emerge spontaneously (or as a result of wishful thinking and/or organized
efforts), need to be captured at that very instance before it fades away with time. That’s why ‘Open
Ideation’ holds the key to organizational success.
2. Campaigns- These are time-bound idea aggregation events which may be generic or topic-focused.
While idea (unlike pizza ) doesn’t always arrive at a particular time, still there are various factors
that can steer such campaigns and attain great results. Some of such factors are-
a) Motivation by management
b) Emotional and Mental engagement
c) Cognitive and Social interaction between people
d) Active participation by leadership
e) Rewards and Recognition for ideas
f) Gamification
g) Purpose-driven Idea management
h) A good Ideation software platform
Campaigns allow you to focus on the areas of the business that you want to innovate in right now at
a given time. By defining a clear topic you improve idea quality, which in return increases the
probability that they actually get implemented. Campaigns by definition have a given time frame,
and sometimes target a specific audience - both of these help to focus the right amount of
corporate energy on the best possible outcomes with minimal rigor.
3. Process Driven: This is more related to product enhancement and integrated with the product or
service development lifecycle. This helps in adding value to your product thereby generating
revenue through upselling or adding new clients.

5.  One of the most influential and significant
benefit of Ideation event, to me, is
improvement in employee satisfaction by
instilling enthusiasm through such
collaborative exercise. Not only does it keep
techies energetic but also will improve
employee retention by keeping them engaged
and giving them platform to exhibit their
technical prowess and thus quenching their
thirst for working on new ideas and
technologies.
 Improvement of networking and collaboration
among employees.
 Identification, development and mentoring of
the high potential employees by giving them
chance to unfurl their wings.
 Establishment of a decentralized Idea
community and an Innovation process for a
long term.
 Discovery of new, distinct and potentially
valuable ideas and solutions for existing
customers which could not have been
discovered otherwise.
 Discovery of out-of-the-box ideas by
recognizing new customer needs that have
been non-existent so far which would
subsequently help in tapping new customers
or building up a new product altogether.
 Last, but not the least, a feeling of satisfaction
among employees, management, leaders by
doing something other than the usual daily
work thus adding that aroma of newness to
work.
Ideation Benefits

6. Suicidal Ideation: Causes of Ideation Failure
Having got enough understanding of Ideation, time to see the challenges and issues that makes most of
the Ideation events unsuccessful or rather partially-successful.
Half-hearted approach by Leadership and Management
Ideation (or any other Innovation initiative) doesn’t work out the way many companies expect. Despite
increasing commitment, funding and organizational accountability, many companies are disappointed by
the returns they are deriving from their investments. Correspondingly, they are scaling back expectations.
Instead of the disruptive products, services, and business models that were anticipated several years ago,
many initiatives have become considerably more limited in scope. This cautious perfunctory approach to
innovation is understandable, given the relatively disappointing results. At the same time, however, it is a
potentially perilous strategy. Leaders must understand that the enterprises that restrict themselves to
incremental innovation, risk unknowingly entering a vicious cycle in which they lag ever farther behind.
One of the biggest hurdles to innovation is a conservative approach, which limits innovation to small
incremental improvements and fail to result in significant step changes and revenue opportunities. Another
major challenge is lack of systematic, enterprise-wide processes capable of commercializing inventions into
products or services at scale, bringing them to market in a sufficiently timely fashion and reaping the
expected returns.
According to Gartner’s Anthony Bradley, the vast majority of social collaboration initiatives fail due to “lack
of purpose”. Bradley suggests that the current “provide and pray” approach is underwhelming with just a
10% success rate.
Insufficient Time for Innovation
One of the biggest ideation challenges is the everlasting condition of real or perceived lack of time.
While most of the organizations consider innovation of utmost importance and initiate Ideation events,
most of the employees remain so engrossed and swamped in their project work , that only a few could get
time to think and add ideas. This shows the biggest gap between the planning and implementation of such
innovation initiatives. There is no dearth of expertise and skills for technological innovation, however, in
most of the cases, management prefers project deliveries over creative thinking and thus focus on
performance and efficiency.
Deadlines and everyday distractions take away from the time necessary for people to make creative
contributions. For example, questions such as- Do we really have time for this? or ―What’s the charge
code? can easily frustrate any initiative, be it innovative or not.

7. Ideas need time to breathe and people need time to soak in the problem, challenge or opportunity. This
requires some form of organizational slack, or the active facilitation of opportunities for people to spend
time thinking and connecting with others beyond the needs of their current assignment.
Organizations should propel employees to spend time for a range of ideation activities: creative thinking,
making idea contributions, collaborating with others, participating in events, reviewing contributions and so
forth. While some employees can use this time for hanging around, management should be more
concerned about those few who would utilize this time to come up with creative sensational ideas.
Mundane Environment
Creating and maintaining a collaborative environment for evolving ideas is crucial to successful ideation.
This also helps level the playing field so that ideas can compete on fair terms.
A research suggests that process (ideation), management (guidance) and intrinsic motivation all play key
roles in driving creativity and innovation in organizations. Unless you combine these forces with wishful
thinking, you would face difficulties in running ideation events.
While employees want to participate in such events, they get so engrossed in project commitments that
they enervate and develop lackadaisical attitude towards Innovation. Somewhere they have a feeling that
their performance appraisal is directly linked to fulfillment of client obligations or project responsibilities.
Lack of guidance and motivation from management is a big impediment in the success of ideation event
(or any other innovation event) unsuccessful.
Ineffective Communication
Poor definition of problems, challenges and opportunities may also render ideation efforts ineffective.
Having made contributions, most people accept the fact that their ideas may be rejected, but they would
like to know why. They would like to get feedback in a timely fashion and they would like to see that at least
some ideas, even if they are not their own, are actually acted upon. Failure in establishing Ideation point-of-
contact and ineffective communication with individuals having ideas subsequently leave a deep impact on
the participant resulting in a systemic failure of such events.
Unstructured Platform for Idea (Innovation) Management
Most of the widely-deployed Innovation platforms, used in the organisations, lack inherent capability to
transform ideas into projects. In some of the cases, ideation platforms require steep learning curve or have
set of documented procedures that make it difficult for the contributor acting as a repulsive factor.
Companies use general purpose communication platforms to crowd-source ideas while such platforms act
just like “Digital Suggestion Box” of ideas. These softwares do not have the capability and functionality to
capture entire life-cycle of an idea right from its emergence to its culmination. Without a complete
enterprise Innovation platform, companies and teams fail to derive measurable results and business value
from Ideation events.

8. According to a study, only 25% of organizations have gone past the use of a generic social media tool to
step up to one that has dedicated innovation capabilities built in or added on. Such general communication
tools, when used for Idea development, often “create silos of implementations, without agile frameworks for
managing change. As a result of using such technologies for innovation, companies are being forced to
manage innovation within business departments – such as IT, sales and marketing. In the absence of proper
innovation tools and a holistic approach, opportunities are lost.
Half-hearted
approach by
Leadership and
Management
Insufficient Time for
Innovation
Mundane
Environment
Ineffective
Communication
Unstructured Platform
for Idea (Innovation)
Management

9. Successful Ideation: Ways to bloom Ideation
Keeping all these issues into consideration, organisations need to plan ideation events, with comprehensive
set of innovation armaments to harness creativity thereby shortening the divergence between expectations
and results giving way to competitive advantage.
What can companies do to improve disappointing performance and deliver results from an ideation event?
While the answers can be exuded from the challenges discussed earlier, there are various ways to empower
such initiatives which will be discussed henceforth.
Holistic, Formal process for Ideation
Organizations, that have a holistic,
formal system in place for ideation,
consistently report better outcomes
and higher levels of satisfaction
from their innovation investment.
With a formal ideation process in
place and an organizational home
to nurture creativity, companies can
bring forth breakthrough
innovation and develop new
markets. With a complete process
in place, companies can ensure that
ideas are not just generated but
actually completed. Repeatable and
scalable innovation requires
mobilization of key factors to
achieve success: leadership,
management, process alignment
and technology.
A robust innovation management exploits the strengths of all players in one ecosystem, right from tracking
to evaluation of incoming ideas aligning them with the organization’s strategic goals thereby
commercializing the most promising ideas.
The ideation process can be greatly facilitated by designating organizational roles thus demonstrating
management support. Such roles could include ideation champion, idea campaign manager, idea
champion, ideation evangelist, jury member et al. In case of idea campaigns, review teams must be
designated in conjunction with the initiation of an idea campaign to secure the availability of time and

10. expertise for idea evaluation. This also acts as a motivational factor for contributors as they know that their
idea will be evaluated and will not just lurk in the database.
Define multiple idea stages to match the organization’s innovation process where each stage has its own
graduation threshold. The number of crowd votes, views, discussions and other key parameters can be
defined as thresholds to “graduate” an idea automatically from one stage to the next. This allows for
automated spotting and lifting of good ideas in the early stages of a challenge (Some good ideas can still
be left behind as this method relies on votes, views etc., however, this being a cyclic repeatable process,
good ideas would subsequently make way).
Once “not so good” ideas are screened out, review team can go back to contributors to ask relevant
questions like-
Is your great idea achievable? What’s the goal?
What’s the scope? Is there budget? Is the timing right?
How does your idea fit into the bigger business plan?
Remember: Do not ask these questions in the beginning as it would act as deterrent for contributors since it could confuse them
or overload them by the sheer magnanimity of the questions.

11. Gang of experts or evangelists can further sieve the ideas at later stages using high thresholds and aligning
them with business value. Reviews like marketing review, legal review and operations review can be further
done by review team once an idea reaches a stage where it is seriously being considered for
implementation.
Once the idea is being considered for implementation, you can now dig into the details to create a
schedule: list requirements, outline resources, create dependencies, develop budgets and add assignments.
A well-defined end-to-end process, of leveraging each phase and utilizing all the people in your ecosystem
in a frictionless way, can help develop transformative ideas and drive sustainable business growth.
Effective Project Management
An ideation event can never be successful unless you derive value out of the good ideas by
commercializing them and project management plays a key role in that part. To derive the most out of an
idea, a sound plan accompanied by a flawless execution is required. This can be achieved by an effective
mechanism of task assignment, progress tracking and dynamic communication. Identify bottlenecks before
they impact the timeline and ensure that milestones and deadlines are in context with each other and
aligned to project goals. To save time and effort, make sure everyone on the team can access, download,
share, and revise documents quickly and ensure people working on the project always have the latest
version using versioning tools. Consider using shared repositories or online services like Dropbox, Box,
Google Drive or SkyDrive, unless there are business reasons to avoid using these services.
Final success depends on agility, celerity, task management, alignment of dispersed cross-functional teams
and acceleration of time to market.
Rewards and Recognition
Use of rewards and recognition drive employee engagement and catalyze innovation. They aren’t just
about making employees feel good but can help propel revenue growth, boost worker productivity and
improve employee retention. With a phased approach in ideation event with different levels of filtering,
employees should be recognized for clearing various levels, even if their ideas do not produce tangible
benefits. One of the ways could be making participation in such event part of performance evaluation with
high weightage to motivate for such activities.

12. In cases where ideas develop into actual new products, incentives might include cash rewards similar to
those many organizations offer for patents. If an idea develops into a new business, the incentive might
take the form of stock options.
Strong Intent of Leadership
A purposeful roadmap with a determined execution path and a disciplined investment approach addressing
risk management, companies can drive high returns from innovation. A less conservative approach towards
innovation is required to disrupt market rather than betting on safer opportunities. Bigger and disruptive
innovation requires identification, measurement and management of risk.
According to Forrester, “Executives, including the CIO, must create a corporate culture that encourages
employees to contribute new ideas, solicit ideas from partners and customers, and support an embedded
innovation process. To help build and maintain an innovation culture, CIOs must work to enable a culture of
trust, acceptance of failure, flexibility, and open communications across the enterprise.”
An open approach to R&D is required, which looks beyond the enterprise for skills, know-how and expertise
to support the development process.
With that in place the entire organization stands to see iterative gains and impressive wins.
Innovation Time-Offs for Employees
If you've used a Post-it Note lately or sent a message from a Gmail account, you've been the beneficiary of
a corporate innovation program that gives employees time to be creative. Google is well known in the tech
community for its "20% time," which gives employees a day a week to follow their passions. 3M Corp. has
allotted 15% of its employees' time to innovation, which led to the creation of the now-ubiquitous yellow
sticky note, among other products.
In order to be innovative and creative, employees need time. It's energizing for employees to take a break
from their day-to-day business and think creatively about solving other problems or using technology in a
different way. Employees recognize it as something valuable.
Part of the management, who feels that it's hard to let staffers work even an occasional half-day a week
without expecting tangible results, need transformational shift in mind-set to realize the benefits of such
time-offs to foster creativity as gone are the days of carrot-and-stick form of motivation. For employees, it
can be hard to shift focus and take up something amorphous when real-world deadlines loom. Therefore,
give them a break and let them unfurl their wings and unleash their creativity.
Use of Enterprise Innovation platform
While most of the organisations have accepted the need for innovation via ideation, the majority have not
yet realized the necessity of an enterprise innovation platform to incubate and commercialize ideas. Good

13. innovation platform helps fostering innovation by enabling businesses to engage employees, partners and
customers at scale to find and execute transformative ideas that drive business growth. Such tools add
structure to innovation process linking idea capture and end-to-end idea management with purpose-driven
project management. They have inherent capabilities to progress ideas into projects by engaging
employees, partners, customers and leadership at one place and at the same time managing and executing
the ideas driving growth and profitability by deftly controlling the entire innovation process, from start to
finish.
They are also equipped with data analytics capabilities further helping in idea screening, for instance, they
have algorithms to correct for user voting fatigue, transitive errors and eliminate “gaming the system”.
Some of them come with advanced voting techniques like Pairwise Voting (which presents users with a
series of choices (A or B?)) that can be used to ensure that each idea is being considered carefully and also
to make sure that a breakthrough idea is not left behind to “die in the vine”. Inherent gamification
capabilities make them more lucrative.
Use of such sophisticated, yet simple, enterprise tools can help businesses to innovate faster, manage ideas
and projects more effectively, and demonstrate value that directly contributes to the bottom line.
Gamification
Gamification is the concept of applying game mechanics and game design techniques to engage and
motivate people to achieve their goals. Gamification taps into the basic desires and needs of the users
impulses which revolve around the idea of Status and Achievement.
This is being used in many innovation platforms to induce user participation and it has emerged highly
successful way to engage users by letting users have fun while solving a challenge.
For example, once the users turn in their idea submissions, they can vote on others’ ideas. The voting is in
the form of head to head battles, where points are rewarded for both participation (one point for each
vote, presumably to encourage more activity), and winning battles (two points to the user who comes up
with the better of two ideas). As users accumulate more points, their ideas float up the leaderboard. In
addition to the points earned, users are also provided with virtual currency that they can trade with each
other using ‘Idea Trading’.
Idea Trading is another great mechanism. Idea Trading encourages people to be earnest about what drives
value. They are unlikely for example, to invest their virtual currency in an idea that’s frivolous or less likely to
succeed in the market− much like stockbrokers would evaluate to stocks in the exchange. Idea Trading
allows a subset of ideas to be carefully weighed and is one predictor of an idea’s potential business impact.
Because users build rank and reputation when they earn points, they keep coming to the platform to add
new ideas or vote for other ideas to earn points and exchange virtual currency resulting in an active
increased engagement.

14. Holistic, Formal process for
Ideation
Effective Project Management
Strong Intent of Leadership
Rewards and Recognition
Innovation Time-Offs for
Employees
Use of Enterprise Innovation
platform
Gamification

15. Conclusion
Ideation is a perfect
complement to an approach
of engaging actively with
employees, partners and
customers with an objective
to position strategically and
demonstrate value. Such
initiatives give employees the
freedom to explore and the
ability to be creative, which
can improve morale and
increase work output. When
serendipity strikes, the end
result can be a product or
feature that boosts
productivity, increases
corporate revenue, or both.
Companies are realizing the
need for sustainable and
effective innovation via
crowdsourcing. The
fragmented landscape of
expectations and investments
have forced organizations to
put formal systems in place
for social engagement,
innovation management and
project management to keep
up the promise of true
enterprise innovation. They
need to organize ideation
events to unleash a
grassroots level of passion to
generate more innovative
and transformational
changes. If innovation and
creativity are not part of your
existing culture, you're not
going to infuse it in one day
and thus require a consistent
approach by organizations.
A willful stimulus from
leadership and a strong
support from management
to build a structured, scalable
and comprehensive
framework for ideation (and
other innovation exercises)
can help companies position
themselves to seize control
of change and become its
master rather than its victim.
Keep planting seeds and let
ideas germinate.