This paper aims to add to innovation management theory and practice by exploring the interrelationship between innovation idea quality and idea providers' network connectivity, using social network analysis. The study uses a database from a company that has worked systematically with idea management over a long period of time and today has a well-established information technology system that collects ideas from a large number of employees. In addition to the idea database, a number of interviews with key individuals within innovation were conducted to create rich contextual knowledge and understand more in detail how ideas are handled in the company. The analysis indicated that there is a clear interrelationship between the network connectivity and the quality of the innovation ideas created. The analysis was done for all the innovation ideas and then for ideas created by single individuals and by groups, respectively. In all three analyses the proportion of high-quality innovation ideas increased, as a step function, between the least connected group and the group thereafter. There is apparently a need for a certain amount of relations to increase the proportion of high-quality innovation ideas generated. Regarding only ideas provided by single individuals, more connections within the network resulted in a higher proportion of high-quality ideas. A different pattern was seen for ideas provided by groups as the proportion of high-quality innovation ideas grew with some increase in the connectivity of groups but declined with a further increase in connectivity. The findings suggest a number of implications for ideation management. To increase the number of high-quality innovation ideas created by individuals, the possibility to interact with other people should be supported and facilitated. However, in these settings, where individuals work with others in different groups, the most connected groups perform worst in terms of the proportion of high-quality ideas generated, which points to the necessity to consider a multitude of factors when managing ideation.

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This paper explores ideation capabilities in large organizations. Based on the dynamic capabilities framework, it is seen that ideation capabilities are managerial and organizational processes for the stimulation, identification, selection and implementation of ideas. In order to explore how these capabilities are manifested and used in firms, case studies of four Swedish companies have been performed. The results of the study show that there are different approaches to ideation. In terms of the nature of innovative ideas, the observations lead to the suggestion that ideation presents some seemingly paradoxical issues to management. Firms with an explicit focus on building ideation practices experience that there are some negative consequences of the resultant formalization. Furthermore, the extent to which many employees should be involved in ideation is a difficult aspect, even though new technologies make this more viable. Also the degree to which the search for ideas should be directed is a non-trivial question, as the ideation processes can be facilitated by both freedom and limitations. It is nevertheless seen that firms can benefit from more deliberate approaches to ideation, in particular if these are broad and balanced and focus on both building capabilities that formalize the informal, in terms of establishing explicit processes, roles and systems, and building capabilities needed to manage informal structures in new ways.

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While organizations increasingly implement web‐enabled ideation systems to access the collective intelligence of their distributed employees, recent studies show that most attempts to use these systems underperform or fail. This article draws on a qualitative case study of the Ericsson system “Idea Boxes” to explore a novel approach to manage ideation based on the use of the moderator role. The aim of this study is to understand to what extent and how the introduction of moderators can contribute to a better management of web‐enabled ideation systems and to overcome the shortcomings commonly associated with their use. The contribution of this study to innovation literature is threefold. First, it develops a conceptual framework that gives insights into the practices implemented by moderators to manage ideation, namely: (1) formulating an ideation strategy, (2) combining means for community building, and (3) formalizing the ideation process. It focuses on unfolding their key complementarities. Second, this study relates these practices to the shortcomings of web‐enabled ideation systems with respect to the sourcing, filtering, and handling of employees' ideas. It discusses how the identified practices can help organizations address these shortcomings by stimulating sustained employee participation, increasing the quality and fit of the ideas generated, and ensuring their efficient selection and integration. Third, this article compares moderators to other innovation roles discussed in the new product development literature with the aim of broadening the future research agenda toward an investigation of emerging organizational roles having limited formal authority to manage innovation. The findings of this study provide valuable guidelines to managers to implement more sophisticated approaches for a better management of the ideation process through web‐enabled ideation tools.