The process of shaping the concept of your new product or service holds a unique place in innovation management and we refer to it as idea management. If you explore this area further, you are going to learn more about the importance of every single person participating. Everyone involved, starting from C-level and all the way to the newly appointed intern have to take responsibilities in an innovation project according to their expertise.

To keep the idea management process moving forward it is essential that individuals understand their distinctive roles within. The human factor, being a vital element of the process, implies that employees must be able to stand out with their individuality, flexibility, and openness in order to bring innovative ideas to materialization.

Innovation is a company’s strategic tool that requires innovative behavior inside the organization. To level up the cumulative effort, we first need to know what we expect from each employee.

During the idea generation process, which usually comes first, there is a need to drive the source of innovative ideas to the desired direction. This part of the process can include all your employees, and because of the diversity of their perspectives, it will be enriched with a spectrum of their extensive experiences. Gather your whole innovation community together and give them a chance to contribute to reaching company objectives. Empirical studies show that organizations that listen to the voices of their employees have more successful innovations and loyal communities.

To prevent the dissipation of the creative power in your innovation team, an innovation framework is required. The best way to provide it is to make sure every participant understands the intended outcome of your innovation project. Also, you have to make sure that there is a possibility for every idea to be worked on among the contributors. Mutual collaboration on ideas can further enrich the original concepts and lead to an even better outcome.

Moving to the next stage, the decision to appoint someone from your organization to filter out all submitted ideas seems only logical. Depending on the scope of collected ideas, and the complexity of chosen filtering criteria, there can be one or several people in charge of this. Whoever you choose to entrust with this task should clearly understand the strategic goal of the new project. That is crucial in this step because if one doesn’t get the big picture, many valuable and inspirational ideas can remain overlooked and dismissed. Therefore, we are free to say that this task is of paramount importance. Also, delegating the idea reviewer role during the idea filtering phase will save your precious time for more important, strategic decisions, instead of doing the operative work.