Common Business Problems Where Ideation Has Been Applied

Innovation used to be defined largely by creativity and the development of new ideas. Now, the term encompasses coordinated projects that hone those creative ideas in order to boost the bottom line. At CSC's Idea Central, that's exactly what's happening - not just with employees, but with customers and partners and across the wider ecosystem of global talent.Read more in the CSC World article "Ideation: A 21st Century Suggestion Box.")

There are many ways to use Idea Central to generate and manage innovation, solve problems and collaborate, leading to the effective implementation of ideas. What you read below has not been made up. It is based on case studies and the successful completion of many hundreds of Ideation campaigns supported by the tool. The list summarizes the typical problems other companies have faced as they seek to generate innovation. Use this list as brain salt when considering the ways Idea Central can help your organization.

Adapting to New Market Realities - Companies tend to get stuck in their thinking and are unprepared for the "obvious": market trends that can have profound effect. The event allows the company, in a safe environment, to explore the impact of large-scale, damaging industry trends. The focus is on understanding the change and generating potential solutions.

Achieve Business Goals - The business sets targets and looks to executives and employees to find ways to meet these goals and targets (e.g., "How can we reduce costs by 20 percent?" or "How can we enter the automotive market?").

Avoid Commoditization - Find ways to turn base business profitable, add value through services, or reduce costs, etc.

Best Practice Gathering - Uncover hidden best practices and successfully implemented ideas and share them more formally across the organization.

Breakthrough Perspective/Change - Use methods to generate more radical ideas using perspective-changing methods (e.g., "Think like the Competition," "Destroy Your Own Company," etc.).

Bureaucracy Buster - Identify wasteful processes or procedures to streamline work and reduce overhead. Introduce Lean initiatives.

Business Development - Identify markets/opportunities=, create a solution to fit an opportunity, develop strategic areas of business opportunity.

CEO/Business Leader Special Project - This should include involvement from staff, alignment, understanding of strategic importance, more buy-in, and be part of the internal communication process. Can also be used to initiate culture change.

Channel Leverage - Explore how to leverage partner network or close externals (e.g., agents, distributors, even customers).

Commercial Launch - Discuss how to accelerate product launch of solutions and services, customer and consumer adoption.

Competitive Response - Gather intelligence and to prompt insight on competitive activity. Because competitors generate 20 percent of product innovations, this is a critically important area, especially given that many companies believe themselves to be "fast followers." The benefits are through a globally distributed workforce, focus on solutions, structured content, and ability to search and track over time.

Customer Echo - Collect input from customers using employees as a conduit to gather insight, ideas and experiences and link the input to business needs and corporate strategy.

Customer Ideation - Gather ideas for improved use (can combine with "Flash Sessions" or "Customer Echo"). Get input and insight directly from customers in structured Ideation sessions - face-to-face or virtual - as an isolated process or as an integrated part of a larger process. Use before, during and after a workshop to maintain momentum, and include key audiences unable to attend in person.

Customer-Driven Projects - A customer has set a specific challenge, either short- or long-term, and requests their supplier to address this issue. This can be seen as a form of "innovation outsourcing." In the best firms, the company demonstrates its understanding of the client's needs, their professionalism, and their commitment to the business relationship by providing a structured method for tapping into all employee resources on a timely basis. This is used in industries with high product customization (e.g., IT, specialty chemicals, construction, reinsurance, etc.).

Customer Service - Improve the customer experience across the company (popular in financial services, IT and retail). Identify opportunities to improve customer service, tap into customer insight (voice of the customer, unstated needs and wants) and feed into the R&D, marketing and sales processes. Create differentiators through service innovations.

Diamonds in the Rough - Move the good concepts from events and other sources into a single instance of Idea Central to develop them further with collaborative input. These ideas have not been selected for direct implementation previously because of some missing component (e.g., cost of resources/raw material or lack of technical solution). People are invited to enter the instance, add input and solve problems, and on a periodic basis an evaluation group reviews the ideas, and promotes improved "diamonds" into formal concept projects.

Employee Survey, Voice of Employee - Develop a range of solutions to resolve issues raised through an employee or associate survey. Collaboration is part of the survey (peer review of staff ideas, balancing management views).

Executive - Involve employees in strategy to promote alignment and buy-in, address specific executive challenges, and support the search for large breakthrough-type innovation initiatives for growth.

Finance - Ideal for cost reduction and process improvement; structured tools and processes for the company; solving specific, time-critical problems; creating sustainable competitive advantage through ongoing commitment to innovative work on small - often "invisible" - improvements that competitors find hard to replicate.

Global Expertise - Uncover and leverage pockets of expertise; create networks of experts and interested parties through specific, focused events. Generate more substantive impact than Communities of Practice that tend to be more passive and can quickly lose their dynamism. Draw people out of closed networks and get them to join an event focused on an important problem or challenge. The community follows the problem instead of being stuck in a silo.

Growth Objectives - Identify how to achieve growth targets in existing markets, new markets, new products, and existing products; create organic growth, identify merger targets or joint ventures.

Hot Topics - Create a central place for managers or nominated individuals to expose current, time-limited problems to a willing audience of problem solvers, "creatives," specialists, technologists, helpers and inquisitors. This can be used within departments or functions, or across the organization. Expose the most challenging client problems to a wide audience.

Human Resources - Support general employee engagement goals, resolve issues from employee surveys, perform staff surveys with added value collaboration and idea development stage-gate.

Hypothesis Generation - In R&D or market research, use the system to develop hypotheses in a collaborative environment to develop them into larger concepts.

Idea-a-thon Mass Review - For companies with an existing idea bank or archive, the ideas are imported into an Idea Central instance and evaluated by a group quickly using the Mass Review functionality. This helps flush the old ideas from the innovation program, allowing companies to focus on new Ideation and moving the best ideas forward.

"If I Had a Million Dollars..." - Discuss what to do with extra money and; develop a list of opportunities more broadly to help make better decisions (more options mean better choices).

Information Technology - Make appropriate use of new technology and develop features for release of internal and external business applications; answer the question, "How can IT help the business achieve its objectives?"

Input to Strategy Planning - Involve more employees in the early stage of strategy development, exposing more potential options or solutions to help develop the strategy into meaningful and understood activities. Also communicate strategy changes to staff, use Idea Central to support alignment around goals, and tap into their brainpower to help achieve the goals faster.

Investigation - Engage known and unknown experts on important topics of timely interest (e.g., long-term investigation of an area or short-term problem/solution/opportunity analysis).

Legal - Ensure the company follows good processes, protects intellectual property and streamlines intellectual property processes.

Lessons Learned from Major Repeatable Projects - These might include merger integration, transitions, major product launches, internal system implementations, etc.

Leverage Merger Synergies - Quickly identify cross-boundary initiatives that can yield benefits, specific projects or potential ideas. Involve broader groups and people closer to the business, and be quick to implement. This is usually part of a wider merger and acquisition process.

Life at Our Company - Offer HR or morale building events, collecting ideas on topics such as facilities management, IT support, etc.

Manufacturing - Discuss reducing waste, removing costs, improving quality and safety, and identifying environmental impacts. Also change processes, become more supportive of business objectives, address long-term issues, and share solutions across plants.

New Product Development - Identify potential new products or components for a given marketplace; build up product ideas into concepts.

New Venture Identification and Development - Define large-scale business opportunities (an ongoing process, usually lead by Corporate Strategy, Business Development or New Ventures groups). Invite wide but selective participation from across the organization.

Outsource Provider - Discuss how to add more value to the client, how to bring innovations and changes into the client, and the reverse: how to get more value from the outsourced provider.

Market Exploration - Identify and understand new/potential markets and identify products for existing markets.

Market Research - Prompt insight and impact from market research studies in the business. Present a report plus some interpretation and open it up for an active Sametime/IM or distributed discussion and opportunity development. The event can contain rich media (e.g., video clips) as well as PowerPoint slides, etc.

Marketing - This can be a variety of events, including message development, fleshing out consumer experiences, slogan and brand naming, developing unorthodox marketing tactics, and Ideation on potential advertisements. Identify market opportunities, potential new offerings, slogan ideas, brand names, etc.

Manufacturing - Discuss cost reductions, process improvements, and best practices.
New Product Development - Develop new product concepts, identify potential market opportunities, and support the front end of the product development process.

Platform Development - Identify ways to turn an invention or new product launch into a platform for further products and offerings, reducing the overall cost of the initiative and increasing the profitability of the new venture.

Process Improvement/Cost Reduction - Find ways of reducing costs (broad or focused), incremental and large-scale cost reductions, process improvements. Can be used in all business areas (e.g., a drug company used the system to improve the efficiency of the R&D discovery process).

Product/Solution Features - Discuss features or improvements in new products, solutions, service releases (technology, consumer product, software, business services, etc.).

Public Relations - Develop messages, come up with new methods.

Regional Growth - Discuss how to support international expansion, sharing experiences and ideas from the parent company, using the new region as a testing ground and providing input back, and integrating the global firm to leverage global expertise and perspectives.

Regulatory Impact - Identify how planned or new regulation will impact the business, and what opportunities there are across the range of corporate activities (e.g., Sarbanes Oxley, Check21 regulation, etc.).

Retail - Gather employee input from observing customers (sometimes supported with in-store kiosk access, but more successfully with at-home access for staff).

Research & Development - Discuss technology solutions and applications for existing or new technology; improve efficiency of R&D process and evaluate projects.

Sales - Identify new selling opportunities, explore new markets, improve selling processes and interaction with the rest of the firm and with customers.

Sales Targets - Discuss how to hit sales targets, stretch goals (product, marketing, process mix, etc.); how to improve sales efficiency (information availability, sharing with departments, etc.); change to non-product part of what is being sold (e.g., pricing, legal agreements, packaged services, etc.).

Six Sigma - Support the idea generation and idea hopper process (either ongoing or on a campaign approach), storing the ideas not developed for potential future use.

Strategic Customer Opportunity - Also known as "What can we sell?" This event is used by companies targeting large, strategic accounts in which they would like to engage a new client, or grow their presence with an existing client. It is most useful for companies with a large range of offerings and a distributed organization (e.g., IT companies, outsource providers, etc.). The best events broaden the topic to include service offerings, ways of managing the relationship, pricing, agreements, etc.

Supply Chain & Procurement - Tap into the supply chain for improvements, cost reductions and ways of adding more value through supplier-driven innovation.

Supplier Ideation - Generate ideas with suppliers for cost savings, new innovations, etc.
Technology R&D Corner - Identify technology looking for applications, problems looking for solutions, and markets looking for applications and solutions; explore technologies, evaluate projects.

Trends and Insights - Gather consumer or market trends and use this as stimuli for employee creativity for new product development, marketing initiatives, R&D, service opportunities, etc. These events started in consumer packaged goods companies, but the trend has now spread even to financial service companies that want to delve deeper into customer problems, and understand trends in advance of specific customer needs.

Turnaround - Develop ideas to solve turnaround problems, explore cost reductions, discuss the real problems in the short timeframe, align staff to appreciate the severity of the situation, and develop growth strategies to allow the company to progress after the immediate problems are addressed.