For leading companies, innovation is a structured and measurable system. It is supported by a strong innovation culture, and it becomes a part of employees’ daily duties by using the advantages of technology. Google has a long history of encouraging its employees to be more creative and innovative, which led to the creation of the “20% time” project. The idea behind this concept is to empower employees to spend up to 20% of their time working on ideas considered useful and beneficial to Google. The development of Google News, Gmail and even AdSense are just some of the products developed thanks to this project. 

Companies with defined innovation culture recognize the contributors to the innovation process. As the innovation process starts with an idea, today, more than ever, companies turn to their employees as they are the closest to the customers and processes. Being in the positions to spot the possibilities for valuable improvements, employees are recognized as productive contributors to the performance, profitability and brand of any business. It is easy to measure employees’ contributions when their activities result in new products and services, improved processes, or cost savings. However, when it comes to ideation, what are the means of measuring employees’ engagement and performance?

The means of measuring employees’ ideation performance

The part of the innovation system dealing with idea generation is called “ideation”, “idea management”, “fuzzy front-end innovation”. Each and every employee is usually included in idea management, along with other relevant people such as partners, stakeholders, customers and online community. Your ideation community, like any other social community, works successfully when employees contribute in diverse ways. Companies are well aware of the fact that not all employees are able to create valuable ideas, yet they can contribute to the idea development process through collaboration. It actually means that by commenting, voting and adding various documentation, any employee can support and improve the overall ideation process.

To measure employee engagement and performance in the field of idea management, end-to-end innovation management software can be of great assistance as it provides custom build reports. The most important objectives of custom reports are KPIs tracking employees’ ideation performance.

Employees ideation KPIs

Idea management key performance indicators are designed to measure the employee’s engagement rate through their ideation activity rate. Key indicators of employees ideation performance are:

• The number of submitted ideas
• The number of collaborated comments
• The number of expressed votes

The importance of  recognizing the top ideation contributors 

For innovation to be successful, it is important to identify top contributors, connect them in a purposeful manner, give them the freedom to innovate and award them for their achievements. As we mentioned, innovation management software should provide you with the report metrics measuring your ideation performance KPIs.

These reports are designed to pinpoint your most productive contributors and innovators. You should be able to quickly recognize specific employees’ engagement which contributes to your innovation and brings more value to the organization. These reports will provide you with enough information to recognize your top contributors. The leading world organizations enhance the innovation process through rewards and recognition programs as they make employees more motivated to participate in innovation activities.