Turning ideas into innovations - introducing demand-driven collaborative ideation

Abstract

Web-enabled tools for ideation are becoming increasingly diffused in companies, but their true impact on innovation performance has been questioned. A factor that can explain some of the so far missing performance of these firm-internal systems for ideation is a lack of attention to the demand-side of ideation. Frequently, the focus of ideation is put more or less unilaterally on the supply-side, with the aim to generate as many or as good ideas as possible, instead of focusing on innovation needs. The aim of this article is to describe and analyse demand-driven collaborative ideation, with a particular emphasis on its management aspects. In order to empirically investigate how to manage this new approach to ideation, a case study of Ericsson, a Swedish multi-national corporation, has been performed. The results highlight that incentives, visibility and resources are three main components of demand-driven collaborative ideation and outline key challenges with this new approach to ideation.Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Björk, J., Karlsson, M.P. and Magnusson, M. (2014) 'Turning ideas into innovations -introducing demand-driven collaborative ideation', Int.

Moderating Ideation in Web‐Enabled Ideation Systems

“…This system was designed around virtual idea boxes and the key principles of openness, collaboration, and sharing, with the purpose of enabling all employees widely distributed across the organization to share and develop their ideas. Over the years the system has attracted—through viral marketing—increasing participation and interest and has been broadly adopted across the organization, becoming the main idea management tool (Björk et al, ). Over time, the system has become recognized as a successful case of web‐enabled idea management: it counts approximately 440 different virtual boxes, more than 35,000 submitted ideas, and around 70,000 comments, with one out of 27 ideas becoming implemented on average (Björk et al, ).…”

“…The main ambition of Ericsson was to develop a self‐organizing system to ensure that ideas coming from distributed employees would be transferred to parts of the organization where they could be utilized for innovation (Björk et al, ). The main objective was to handle ideation efforts in a distributed way, also in light of the diverse innovation needs found across the whole organization.…”

“…These boxes can be regarded as different ideation initiatives existing within the organization that are driven by its employees. A virtual idea box reflects a specific local innovation need that moderators consider relevant enough to act upon by creating a “virtual space” for employees to share ideas related to that need (Björk et al, ).…”

“…The study draws on a qualitative, inductive case‐study of the Ericsson system “Idea Boxes” to investigate to what extent and how the introduction of a human component such as moderators may contribute to a better management of these initiatives and to overcome their common shortcomings, especially in relation to the sourcing, filtering, and handling of employees' ideas, as discussed by previous research. The Ericsson system is a well‐established ideation system organized around virtual idea boxes that are driven and locally managed by a collective of distributed moderators—i.e., employees who can assume the informal role of facilitating ideation efforts (Björk, Karlsson, and Magnusson, ).…”

“…Arguably, addressing this aspect is important considering that previous studies have mainly focused on investigating traditional and more passive ideation systems—i.e., where the role of the moderator is not present. However, more recent studies have hinted at the need to explore more sophisticated approaches and strategies to manage ideation, where both substantial managerial efforts and novel technical functionalities may be needed to attract and facilitate participants and favor the implementation of valuable ideas (Adamczyk, Bullinger, and Moslein, ; Björk et al, ; Haller, Adamczyk, Bansemir, Bullinger, and Möslein, ; Whelan, Parise, de Valk, and Aalbers, ). In this respect, the use of moderating roles is mentioned as an element that organizations can introduce to manage participants' online efforts, but which is only observed in few organizations (Adamczyk et al, ; Björk et al, ; Leimeister, Huber, Bretschneider, and Krcmar, ).…”