Supporting ideation in a business environment

Supporting ideation in a business environment

by N.Balajhi

Business Growth Consulting

"We are ideating"

These are the words uttered in an IBM ad by a person in response to a question raised by another person who walks into a big hall where many people are lying down. Now this itself is an idea of allowing people to take time to ideate. A senior executive in one of my client companies quipped, "if we follow this, then rest assured we will have lot of people volunteering to ideate; only that it will generate more snoring". Not that he is not impressed by the idea but just that he is far from impressed with his people. There are two things here, first, you don't need to have a big hall for people to come, lie down and ideate and secondly ideation is not something to be thrown open for people take up voluntarily.

Ideation in business

Ideation is a process of forming and relating ideas while Ideating refers to forming a mental image of something that is not present or that is not the case

Businesses know the value of ideas but often they don't promote conducive environment for ideas to grow and nurtured. Ideation process helps companies to generate ideas to address and solve business problems and support innovation. Knowledge management system helps a business to generate ideas as long as issues concerning sharing of knowledge are well addressed and people are open to share and use knowledge. In a way a KM system is a prerequisite for ideas to come through and surface.

Supporting ideation

Like many other things in a business, ideation requires necessary infrastructure, facilities and conducive environment for it to work. It may not be a continuous process and certain steps can be skipped if the motivation is greater. The diagram given below capture things those are necessary for ideation to take place in a business environment. It however does not cover the cognitive process that creates the idea.

Some tips to kick start ideation in your organisation

• Encourage people to ideate and share their ideas

• Put in place a comprehensive knowledge management system

• Set up a full-fledged central corporate library (Provide both hard and soft resources)

• Find ways to encourage people to use the library. Discourage people taking resources home.

• Encourage people to set up knowledge or say even Idea clubs to meet (online or in person), communicate, share and discuss issues, ideas and knowledge. Integrate it with the KM system.

• Set up corporate blog or publish periodic internal newsletters. Encourage people to contribute and reward valuable contributions.

• Add some fun element, wherever possible, bring together people, help them think and act