Hello everyone, and welcome back. On this video on idea management, I want to talk a bit more about the common challenges of idea management, so of course we kept the best for last. If you never managed an idea management program you might have wondered what the big problem actually is? Can it be so difficult to organize a process to recognize, support, develop and evaluate ideas? Well, we all know this example here. This idea almost didn't make it to the market because the management initially saw no value in it. With a proper idea management program this might have been different, and the Post-It notes could have been launched earlier. But managing an idea management program remains quite a difficult process. In this video, I will discuss what I consider to be the two most important challenges of idea management. Based on my own research and that of others, I will then offer some ideas about how those challenges can be tackled. The first challenge many companies experience is to motivate employees, suppliers or customers to repeatedly come up with ideas. So what you'll often see is that once an idea management program starts, there are many ideas. But over time, the idea submissions decrease. So the question is, what can you do to have a continuous inflow of ideas? The second challenge that many companies face is the quality of ideas. So there might be many ideas in the system, but a large majority of them is mediocre. It can be quite expensive and frustrating to administer and evaluate a high number of low quality ideas. The challenge is therfore to increase the quality of ideas. To answer the first question, it's important to know what stimulates people to continuously submit ideas. In one of my research projects, I studied the R&D idea management program of a very big multinational company. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you the name of the company, because it wants to stay anonymous. I looked into some 1800 ideas, which were submitted by employees of that company over the course of 12 years. I wanted to know whether accepting or rejecting an idea leads to more idea submissions. I counted the acceptance of an idea by the company as a success and the rejection of an idea by the company as a failure. So what do you think? Did the acceptance or the rejection motivate people to come back with more ideas? Here you see the surprising result. I found that rejecting an idea, actually motivates people to come back with a new idea. The opposite held true for people who were successful. Those whose ideas were accepted. These people were less likely to come back with a new idea. So rejections have a motivating outcome. But there's a limit if you get rejected time and time again. However, I saw that people in the company I studied could take quite some rejections. Only after a tipping point of 27 rejected ideas, people would slowly stop submitting new ideas. How can we use this result to make sure that employees repeatedly submit ideas? There are several lessons that you can take away from my research. First of all the finding that failure does not lead to less but more motivation to submit new ideas means that the company I studied did something right. Employees felt safe to submit ideas even though their earlier ideas were rejected. This means there was a low threshold to submit ideas as it had no consequences for the employee when an idea was rejected. The company achieved this by, for instance, having an independent idea evaluation committee. It was not the direct boss of an employee who decided about whether to implement the idea or not. The judgement of the independent idea evaluation committee wasn't visible to a broader audience. So, only a few people knew when an idea was rejected. This created additional safety. If you want employees to repeatedly submit ideas, it's therefore important that they feel safe to submit ideas. And that they don't have to fear any consequences of failure, for their status, for their career, etc. In addition, I noticed that employees felt that each of their ideas were evaluated in a fair manner. They learned a lot from the feedback that they received. So even though an idea wasn't accepted, people could use the feedback. For instance, for another project they were working on. This means that companies should have proper feedback processes in place. Only then will people come back with more ideas. The finding that successful people didn't come back with more ideas is more problematic. You want to make sure that those people who already prove to have good ideas come back with more. So, what can you do about this? One idea could be to provide them with different type of feedback. Feedback on the idea is of course important, but for people who are successful it might also be useful to provide motivational feedback. For example, one could stress how important a current idea was for the company, and how valuable new ideas would be. One could specifically ask and motivate the person to submit new ideas in the future. Finally, the company could communicate that it very much wants to help the idea submitter with the development of a new idea. In the same research project, I also studied whether people learn more from their prior failures or successes. The question that I specifically looked into was does prior success or failure lead to better ideas the next time. So this should provide some clues to the second challenge I mentioned before, how to improve the quality of ideas in an idea management program. And here you see what I found. Often people say that you learn from your failures, but in this study, it seemed that people learned more from their successes. The more ideas of an employee were accepted, the higher the likelihood that his or her next idea was also accepted. An explanation for this finding is that people who are successful gained experience related to all phases of developing an idea, from generation to implementation. They have a bigger picture of the process and actually learned what the company is looking for and what it required from them and their ideas in each stage of the idea development. This knowledge helped them to submit better ideas the next time. So what should companies do to improve the quality of ideas? Again, there are several lessons that you can take away from my research. One strategy could be to include previously successful ideas submitted in a new idea. For instance, a company could set up a mentorship program. Whenever someone submits an idea, he or she gets assigned to a mentor who were successful in developing ideas before. In that way, experienced mentors can share lessons learned to help improve an idea's chances of success. They can guide less experienced idea submitters through the process and and thereby serve as role models. My analysis also suggests that working on an idea in a team, rather than alone, increases the quality of ideas. In a team, people can share what they've learned and this exchange of knowledge improves an idea's chances of success. Another lesson could be to provided different feedback to those employees whose ideas were rejected. Evaluators should of course discuss why an idea wasn't accepted, but they should also offer more guidance about how to meet the criteria the next time. So this would be feedback about what an idea needs to have for it to be accepted the next time In this video I discuss two general challenges that many idea management programs face. The first one was to motivate people to continuously submit ideas, and the second one was about how to improve the quality of ideas. I hope that the insights of my research gave you some hints and ideas about how to address these challenges. This is the last video in this week. So, it's time for me to say goodbye. I hope you enjoy the rest of the MOOC. And I'd be happy to stay in touch with you and learn more about your experiences and thoughts on idea management. Take care everyone.
