For that reason, many companies are looking for idea tracking software, something that will provide them with an easy way of keeping track of their employees’ ideas. While our software does track ideas, we refer to it as idea management software because it’s not just tracking ideas that will help you motivate your staff, you need to manage the ideas for three reasons.

Management creates results. One of the biggest reasons for migrating from long and tedious meetings into an online space is efficiency. Companies want idea tracking software particularly because of the benefits technology provides them. But if a piece of software merely tracks ideas, it just becomes an online repository for ideas that doesn’t actually serve the company. Idea management software should have analytical and technical capabilities that make it easy to mould into whatever process for turning ideas into results that your company decides on.

It’s not just about popularity. Idea management should help you not only find the most popular ideas, but to put all ideas through a system that will test them and ensure they meet all of the specifications that your company needs. Without these systems in place, idea tracking software can lose it’s purpose, bring you only the most popular ideas with you left to do the vetting outside of the system, creating a timelier and more difficult process for administrators. Idea management should allow you to implement these checks and balances within your own system. In turn, that provides you with the transparency that will motivate your employees to feel as though all of their ideas are getting equal recognition, regardless of popularity.

Challenges are motivating. It’s often difficult for anyone to take that first initial plunge and you might find that if you implement an idea tracking solution, rather than an idea management solution, employees are anything but motivated because they may be worried about submitting the first idea. An idea management solution not only allows for employees to get involved themselves, but also provides the administrators with the ability to spark debate and facilitate the flow of ideas. Our idea management system allows administrators to create Challenges as often as they’d like which encourage employees to get together and solve a problem with their own ideas, or even to just to think about something new that should motivate them every week.

If you’re looking for a great way to motivate your staff, don’t just track their ideas, manage them to create real results.

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Why Innovation is Crucial For Survival - While innovation may seem like the stuff of IT companies and engineering, Niklas Olsson, FINAT marketing committee member and global brand manager at Flint Group Narrow Web, explains that innovation is crucial for almost all businesses.

Five Characteristics of A Successful Innovation Process - Some great principles on improving innovation that can be applicable to many industries and sectors.

Why Innovation Fails: The Past Vs. Future Problem - Douglas Stone explains how focusing on both the future and the past are not mutually exclusive activities and seeing them as such may cause innovation attempts to fail.

Why Management Sometimes Buries The ‘Big Idea’ - A great take on how businesses usually approach people on their staff who are bursting with ideas and how to best utilise those individuals, rather than sweeping them to the side.

Warning To Innovators: Be Thick Skinned – While this article focuses on payments, it’s points about innovation are still relevant, specifically the reminder that the finished idea isn’t always the same as the original pitch.

We’ll be back next week with more innovation links.

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What keeps people talking? While popular ideas may not be the easiest ones the implement, it’s worth keeping in mind what ideas are getting the most attention, simply because those may be the easiest ones to find willing volunteers for. One of the struggles with new ideas is the time it takes to get employees on board with them, either in administrating the idea or adopting it on a day to day basis. If you have an idea that’s already got your team motivated and excited, it might be half the battle once you’ve decided to approve the idea and make it happen!

What has the strongest foundations? Part of our idea management solution comes with several features to help you test the strength of ideas, including review boards. An idea isn’t much of a benefit to your company if it can’t be implemented and the point of gathering employees, clients, stakeholders, and others together into one space is to benefit from their collective experience. If you set your team up with groups, review boards, and other functions, you can guarrantee there will be a strong vetting process for your ideas and they won’t just fall apart post-implementation. The ones with the best foundations will make it through the management process.

What has the greatest capacity for change? Most leaders understands that business environments change, and they can and have changed rapidly over just a small span of a year. Ideas that are flexible or allow for change are going to be the ones you want to consider investing in, because one of the biggest obstacles toward innovation is stubborn bureaucracy. The last thing you want to do when approving ideas is improve even further layers of red tape to prevent your business from changing as your clients or environments do. Emphasise the importance of flexibility to your employees when posing challenges for new ideas and put it through your own field test for flexibility and you might find that the ideas that you approve not only have the capacity to improve your business, but change over time as your business does.

Of course, our best advice to companies wishing to really invest in managing the best ideas for their business is to provide a really accessible place for all their employees via an idea management system. The best type of system will not only incorporate the ability for your employees to submit all of their ideas, but also give you the tools to analyse and manage those ideas effectively. It’s been our experience that finding ideas is only half of the battle. Management is just as important as innovation.

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Balancing Corporate Structure and Innovation - Some great tips from Australia’s Business Insider on how to balance corporate structure and innovation.

The Crowdstorm Effect - You’ve heard of “crowdsourcing”, but what about “crowdstorming”? This Innovation Excellence article talks about how you can source ideas from a crowd.

Innovation is Dead - Chris Barez-Brown addresses the problems with trying to pin “innovation” down into a scientific formula and while we don’t think innovation is necessarily dead, we do agree that trying to get innovation down to an exact science isn’t what it’s about.

Getting past the roadblocks to government innovation - While this is a US based article, some of the same roadblocks for innovation in government also exist for UK governments.

Egyptian Teenager Unveils Plan to Turn Plastic Waste into $78 Million of Biofuel - A great story of innovation happening across the globe! Sixteen year old  Azza Abdel Hamid Faiad has discovered an inexpensive catalyst to breaking down plastic polymers.

Gizmodo: 8 Rooms in 420 Square Feet – A great video that shows the result of crowdsourcing for ideas. Maximising the space of a small apartment was possible with the help of ideas!

In case you missed out on it, here’s been some news from the Wazoku team!

Hotbed of Innovation on BDaily - Our founder, Simon Hill, recently wrote an article for BDaily on how to create a hotbed of innovation within your company.

Groups and Review Boards - We’ve recently introduced two new features available on Idea Spotlight: Groups and Review Boards!

We’ll be back next week with more innovation links.

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Groups – Administrators will now be able to add users to a group. Accounts receive an unlimited number of groups and, when they invite users into Idea Spotlight, they can also automatically invite them into specific groups. It’s easy to change which users are in which groups from the administration panel. The huge benefit to having groups is that it allows users, when creating an idea, to share the idea with specific groups and saves the trouble of having to remember names or email addresses for every individual in the group!

Screenshot of the creating groups feature. Click to expand.

Review Boards – Every idea goes through a process of review and management and we’ve built a functionality into our platform that makes that review process easier. Administrators will be able to enact review boards to challenges and choose whether the reviews will occur at the end of the challenge or during the time span of the challenge. Admins can also choose who they would like to be on the review board an elect a Board Lead to give the final approval on all ideas within a challenge. Review criteria, which are optional, can also be implemented and reviewers give the idea a score based on these criteria between 1 and 5. This makes the review process even simpler to conceptualise and execute.

Screenshot of the review boards. Click to expand.

With both of these features, our users will be able to find new ideas better, but manage them effectively. Sourcing ideas can sometimes be half of the battle. Managing and analysing them is the real issue which both of these new features will help our clients address.

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The value of innovation and good ideas is increasing all the time. Tough economic conditions means businesses must work harder to differentiate themselves and remain competitive, whilst NESTA (the UK’s innovation agency) stated last year that investment in new products and ideas has fallen by £24bn since the recession hit in 2008.

Anyone within an organisation can have an idea that has true impact. When this occurs, not only does the business benefit but the employee feels like they are making a significant contribution and is engaged and motivated to contribute more ideas. But how do you go about establishing innovation in your company? Here are my top five tips:

If you’d like to see all of Simon’s tips for establishing innovation, check the BDaily article out here. And keep following our blog for more information about innovation management.

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1. Keep old customers. All of our companies have their eyes on the prize, but they’re also interested in the prizes they’ve already worked hard to achieve. With innovation management, you can take the opinions of your employees and your clients if you’d like to create a better experience for your clients. With a platform that helps you and your employees really put your heads together, you can create a meeting of minds that may be difficult to achieve in person. Keeping your customers happy seems a lot less daunting when you have the knowledge and experience of your entire workforce behind you.

2. Find new customers. There are a variety of ways an innovation platform can help you find customers. Not only do new ideas being new improvements to your product, but you can also utilise the platform itself to generate buzz. Utilise our survey/consultation extension and poll your clients about an important issue and then, don’t just use the data, but publish it and make it known. That knowledge gathered gives your company more leverage as an expert in your friend than anything else. The platform can also help you generate ideas for new products, new services, or improvements that will attract new customers.

3. Perfect a process before launch. We all have great ideas about how a particular idea might carry through in life, but sometimes we don’t know until we actually try it. The benefit of an idea management platform is that you have all of the tools at your disposal for trying an idea before it gets put out to your network. Posting an idea to your platform is like having all of your employees approve it before it happens, which is very useful. If there’s a clink in the chain, the best way to find out is to have all of your employees really vet it themselves before you risk it out in the market.

4. Generate buzz. We’ve already mentioned how our survey/consultation extension can help you generate buzz. Our competition extension can also help you attract attention from different sources. You can create a useful competition that asks for ideas or feedback in exchange for a prize, or you can just gather attention with a prize draw. Either way, having that idea management system attached to the back end means that the results will be worked into your overall innovation mainframe without a lot of hassle with administrative functions and confusion. And of course, developing new products always creates buzz around what your company is doing.

5. Reward effectively. Happy employees and clients are some of the best, most valuable recommendations for your product that you can ever get. Consider, for example, how far the word spread about name of Tiger Bread at Sainsbury’s thanks to a cute letter written by a small customer. That was an opportunity for Sainsbury’s to either ignore a small letter or do something about it. That opportunity, rewarding a customer for a great idea, brought them a lot of publicity and press without much effort on their part. The benefit of an idea management platform, ours specifically, is that the process is very transparent. Whether you’re polling employees, clients, users, or customers, you have a clear audit trail. You know what idea comes from where, making it that much easy to reward the right people.

There’s plenty of opportunities to be had when a company decides to innovate. A platform for that innovation will make generating the culture that much easier and it allows for more freedom for ideas to flow and thus, improve your business!

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Social media can help charities connect with potential donors and spread the word about their causes, but it’s only one piece of the puzzle. Once other charities catch wind of the importance of social media, they will become part of the landscape and you may eventually find your voice drowned out amidst a sea of other charities. Sustainable ideas and development of those ideas will mean much more support over the long term.

This creative way of encouraging donations came from an idea someone had. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

An innovation management platform gives charities a space to flesh out the best fundraising ideas and organise their efforts towards specific challenges and causes. Long meetings not only create obstacles for organising but they’re also difficult for paid employees and volunteers who may find themselves sitting in a meeting that’s discussing an event or an issue they can’t or aren’t addressing. With idea management, volunteers and employees can log in, submit ideas, discuss ideas, and vote on ideas in their own time. They aren’t restricted by the time and location of in person meetings and you can get a lot more dine as a team with a platform than without a platform.

Not to mention, some of our software components or extensions can make it easier to drum up support for your charity. You can use the consultations or survey extension to poll volunteers, employees, or even service users. With that ability you can create effective reports to present towards big funding organisations or factually demonstrate a demand within a community that your charity addresses. With our competitions add-on you can create a true incentive for funding your charity by creating and hosting a competition. You could even hold a competition for the best idea and develop it on the backend with you and your staff. The possibilities of the software are unlimited.

And with our new G-Cloud certification and extensive security features, you never have to worry about the data on your employees or service users being at risk. We ensure that we meet all levels of security with encrypted logins and UK based server hosting that ensures that your data is protected.

There are a lot of great benefits charities can access using idea management software. During a time of economic difficulty, it will be those charities that innovate and drive themselves to the top that will continue to succeed. Charities can be known for innovative and great ideas. You just need to find those ideas and develop them, and nothing gets you closer towards maximising your idea potential than an innovation management platform.

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What skills are needed to be a successful entrepreneur?

Aside from the above, you need to be really pragmatic and not completely tied to your one big idea. We have moulded the company from the first scribbles on a bit of paper to what we are today through incremental learning, letting the market guide us and not be too tied to a rigid vision.

Read the rest of the article including Simon’s answers to Bdaily here.

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10 Bizarre Business Ideas That Made Millions – An interesting look on how even the strangest of ideas can turn out to be something worth a lot. It may make you rethink some of the ideas you originally doubted.

Is Fear of Risk A Factor? – Another article exploring the idea that the fear of risk may be hindering innovation and developments.

Teen’s Invention Could Charge Your Phone In 30 Seconds - A great article focusing on the innovation of 18 year old high schooler Eesha Khare who’s just won an award for her efforts.

Girl, 19, Makes Deworming Tablet - Another great story of innovation, this time of a Ugandan woman who’s made a deworming tablet that has the potential to help out many.

In case you missed out on it, here’s been some news from the Wazoku team!

Wazoku on Government Technology - We’ve recently become G-Cloud certified and had Spotlight featured on Government Technology.

Wazoku on Idea Connection - We’re still up in a vote against some other companies. Please give us a vote!

We’ll be back next week with more innovation links.

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