Seeking Innovation? Ideation Isn’t the Solution

Many oil and gas companies have ideation software designed to capture ideas from employees. While this might make the workforce feel involved in improving operations, in the long run it is not a viable path to innovation.

Ideation Software Downsides

Take a close look at ideation software and you’ll find some drawbacks:

• You may not get out of the box thinking from employees. Besides being encumbered by the current organizational culture — the way we do things around here — the people offering ideas may not be well-versed in the latest or emerging technologies that could lead to innovation.
• Though an idea may be good, it may not be a priority. Employees who don’t have insight into what’s important across the company may be more prone to focus on the parts they do know. However, their good idea could be way down the line on a long list of things that need to get done.
• The pool of ideas doesn’t get fed from outside the organization or the industry at large. Examining innovative concepts from other companies and industries can be a valuable spark to addressing problems effectively.
• Over time, employees can become disenchanted with the ideation program because their suggestions don’t go anywhere.

The Better Path to Innovation? Problem Identification Software

That is, starting with the challenges and issues that are high priority for the company and building solutions from there.

This may sound similar to ideation software, but the two are quite different. Problem identification software:

• Allows a company to group problems by business unit, geography and/or business process and then look across the company for solutions.
• Enables exploration and understanding of the root causes of problems.
• Offers insight into outcomes. Perhaps implementation of another idea or solution will just add more complexity to an already-broken process. The solution may instead be a complete reworking of the process.
• Accesses information from outside the company, and in some cases outside the industry, to find similar problems and accompanying solutions.
• Helps to spark employee innovation and collaboration, because experts from different fields come together to create a solution to a real problem with high priority.

One of our clients said, “I want to know the problems so that I can have the experts involved. I want to see what others have done in our company and what others in our industry are doing. I want to explore what innovation might be out there in the startup community or in the other industries. I don’t need ideas on solving problems from someone who has spent their entire career within our company. That won’t bring me innovation.”

That is a great description of problem identification software.

Let us know if we can help get innovation off the ground with your company.

Jim Lawnin, Managing Partner
jlawnin@bblventures.com