The challenges and benefits of idea management

For organisations to sustain success in their markets, and in order to survive, they need to utilise their workforce as effectively as possible. By stimulating and implementing employees’ ideas for improvement and innovation, idea management encourages people to participate in the organisation, beyond the scope of their job. The results not only benefit the organisation, but also contribute to employee satisfaction

Design thinking: making user happiness the metric for success

Design thinking is a human-centred approach to problem solving. You see it being applied across all industries. Everything centres on the user, the customer, and his or her needs and feelings. At its very best, you closely observe users and identify problems they were not able to express, problems they didn’t even know they had

A New Model for Crowdsourcing Innovation

On paper, crowdsourced innovation makes a lot of sense: If two heads are better than one, why not 20,000? Surely, some of those outsiders will have fresh solutions to your problem. But in practice, such programs have often not worked out as well as hoped. More often than not, even the best crowdsourced ideas disappear in a Bermuda Triangle of logistical difficulties, internal politics, and professional insecurity. The International Committee of the Red Cross has developed a new collaborative approach to crowdsourcing ideas that limits the competition to teams. It designed its Enable Makeathon project not only to generate good ideas of products to help people with disabilities but also to make sure those ideas reach the market

A radical approach to radical innovation

Innovation pays. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google – nearly every one of today’s most successful companies has a talent for developing radical new ideas. But how best to encourage radical initiative taking from employees, and does their previous success or failure at it play a role

Innovation is a team sport

After reviewing the results of an employee innovation programme at a major European corporation, my colleague Michael Jensen and I came to two conclusions. First, people often prefer to come up with ideas alone. Second, this tends to be a mistake

Idea Management: Perspectives from Leadership, Learning, and Network Theory

In this dissertation, we focus on how leadership styles, individual learning behaviors, and social network structures drive or inhibit organizational members to repeatedly generate and develop innovative ideas. Taking the idea management programs of three multinational companies as the research setting, we investigate, in four empirical papers using different sources and methods, how innovative behavior can be supported, influenced, or changed. Within this context, we concentrate on a) the quantity of ideas, b) the quality of ideas, and c) the repeated participation of employees in idea management programs. The findings demonstrate that managers can stimulate employees to submit more ideas through a combination of their leadership style and the organizational mindset they embrace. We also find that people whose prior ideas were rejected in the past are more inclined to initiate new ideas. However, only employees who successfully initiated ideas in the past learn to improve or demonstrate consistency in the quality of their subsequent ideas. We further show that the embeddedness of ties in a network predicts how much time people invest in the development of an idea. Moreover, we find that social network structures dynamically evolve between one idea to the next. In particular, strong ties and a higher network size influence the quality of ideas and vice versa. Together, the insights of the studies illustrate how through leadership, learning, and social networks idea inventors exchange knowledge, build on each other’s expertise, make sense of experiences, and become motivated to constantly generate ideas that move the organization forward

Great successes and great failures: The impact of project leader status on project performance and performance extremeness

Research supporting the Matthew Effect demonstrates that high-status actors experience performance benefits due to increased recognition of their work and greater opportunities and resources, but recent research also indicates that high-status actors face a greater risk of negative performance evaluations. In this paper, we seek to contribute to the status literature by reconciling these findings and ask: To what extent does status influence heterogeneity in performance evaluations? We explore how project leader status affects the performance of innovation projects in the video game industry. We hypothesize that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between project leader status and project performance, and a positive relationship between project leader status and performance extremeness (i.e., performance variation). In order to test our hypotheses, we analyzed the performance of video game projects and computed the status of project leaders by applying a project affiliation social network analysis. We find that an intermediate level of status—neither too much nor too little—is positively associated with average project performance. We also reveal more extreme performance effects for high-status leaders: While some achieve superior project performance, others experience significant project failures. We therefore provide important theoretical and practical insights regarding how status affects the implementation of innovations. We also discuss the implications of these findings for the literature on middle-status conformity

Irrational Resistance or Irrational Support? Performance Effects of Project Leader Status

In this study, we explore the effects of project leader status in new product development projects. We predict and find that that project leader status increases project performance up to a certain point after which it decreases performance. Further, status increases the variability of project performance, that is, it leads to more extreme performance in both directions

Talk, talk, talk: exploring idea conversations and the micro-level foundations of knowledge sharing for innovation

In this study we explore the drivers and consequences of micro-level instances of knowledge sharing for innovation. We do so by focusing on the temporally bounded conversations that colleagues have about new ideas and we study specifically how the strength of ties between these colleagues influences the duration and breadth of knowledge sharing in the idea-related conversations they have over time. A 14-month on-site field study in a multinational company, in which we mapped 496 dyadic relationships regarding 17 new product ideas, shows that knowledge sharing can be explained by the ties between people being either strong or weak, rather than intermediate. We also discover that characteristics of the idea itself shape how tie strength influences the duration and breadth of knowledge sharing in idea conversations. Finally, we provide initial evidence to show how important conversations are for the success of an i