6 ways to make ideation platforms work

The spirit of implementing an ideation platform or running an ideation contest or Ideathon is usually good. You want to leverage the power of the crowds, right? This is a noble view that can, if done right, lift the entrepreneurial culture of a company. It can improve you brand perception as being an innovative company, and ultimately can help you achieve cost savings or generate new revenues if good ideas get successfully implemented.

Yes, but how do you make crowds engaged? Can you sustain that engagement over a longer period of time? And what happens afterwards? What is the percentage of ideas getting implemented? In many cases the air goes out of the initiatives as too little ideas get implemented or the framework for implementing these ideas is inexistent. Many of such initiatives get launched without much afterthought and usually create a communication buzz with limited long term impact. So how do you turn that around? How do you prepare and frame an innovation initiative so that it lives up to expectations?

Here are some elements of an answer. I will give you a few elements to consider when planning for an ideation contest or when preparing to implement an ideation platform. These suggestions are based on my own experiences as a contestant, mentor and judge and are from my personal experience playing around with a few ideation platforms.

• Communications: Whether you want to mobilize your organization or external customers and clients, communications will be critical to success. Majority of the persons participating in these competitions don’t do it for the money or reward, but for the actual visibility it can give them. Proper communication will show that management is supporting the initiative, it will clarify to participants why they should join, what type of impact they can have and how they get recognized for their efforts. Prepare a communication plan for the launch of the campaign and for providing updates during and after the competition.
• Focus: Innovation contests whether run through an ideation platform or as an event, should be short-lived in order maximize the engagement. When the contests run for too long the engagement levels will naturally decrease as day-to-day tasks start to take-over. If you implement an ideation platform it means that you should probably think of running multiple campaigns during the year to solve different problems. In addition, focusing will get alignment and better results. Having the whole organization working on selected challenges rather than trying to be open to all kind ideas will avoid two problems, one is the difficulty or comparing ideas which address very different challenges, and secondly it will help you get rid of noise and complaints.
• Engagement: The engagement can be achieved in multiple ways. One is simply related to the focus management puts on this! If your company president or CEO is not talking about this, then it is probably not that important. Secondly, how relevant is the competition for the employees? Is it framed well enough so that it is relevant for them? Another important aspect is related to the platform itself: does it support comments, likes, dislikes? Is it using gamification techniques to keep people hooked to the platform? Running a competition where people commenting and interacting get equally recognized to idea owners will also stimulate more engagement. Having mentors and persons from management teams responding will show commitment and further empower ideas owners.
• Use innovation coaches and mentors: the usage of trained innovation coaches and mentors interacting with the idea owners during the competition will allow these people to refine their ideas, get early feedback on the viability of the solution and frame these ideas in a business language that makes decision making easier. Usually it improves the quality of the ideas, and it helps translating the ideas into concepts that can be easier sold to sponsors.
• Formalized and normalized selection criteria: one of the risks with internal innovation competitions is that ideas get filtered and rated by line managers whose interest and focus might be different from the company as a whole. Who assesses and what is it that you assess? What criteria should be used? Some examples of common criteria can be: importance of the problem addressed, how innovative is the idea, how difficult is it to implement, etc. The problem I have sometimes seen is that the initial selection is done only on public voting (number of likes or dislikes) and then the idea is discarded by management because it is hard to implement or the business case is not strong enough. In that case it might be better to do a selection in two rounds or that you force a rating on these other criteria. In order to avoid biases, ideas should always be rated by multiple persons.
• Innovation framework: Innovation initiatives to be part of an overall innovation strategy and be anchored with overall strategy and objectives of the company. That means you need to have clear innovation targets and a formal process to manage your innovation funnel. This incudes having clear KPI’s on what it takes for an idea to be moved forward and allocating budget for implementing ideas. In an ideation contest or an ideation platform the top ideas need to be part of your innovation funnel and it should be clear to idea owners what it takes to move these ideas forward. To keep the organization engaged in the you need to explain why some ideas are implemented and why others are discarded.

These are just a few thoughts based on half a dozen campaigns I have been part of as a participant, mentor and judge. What are you experiences? Are there other points you find fundamental to successfully run an ideation competition? What were you challenges implementing an ideation platform?