A few weeks ago, I spoke at a corporate innovation conference in Hong Kong. Organized by the San Francisco-based Brightidea.com (www.brightidea.com), the invitation-only conference provided an open, peer-to-peer exchange of best practice and “best failure” experiences from corporate innovation experts. Here’s what I learned about modern innovation management systems.

What is an innovation management system?

Do you remember the traditional “suggestion box”? Typically, it was a large box with a slot in the top for you and your colleagues to submit ideas for improvements. Even today, many offices still have such a box. But in this second decade of the new millennium, the suggestion box has morphed into an innovation management system. Such a system is usually implemented as a web-based solution, such as the one from Brightidea.com, or as a software application like the one offered by Imaginatik (www.imaginatik.com).

The suggestion box only allowed communication to flow in one direction. Innovation management systems improve on this by enabling discussions of the ideas. Employees can use their computers or mobile devices to submit ideas, and other employees can collaborate in innovation by giving feedback and support to the idea contributors.

For corporate innovation managers and their teams, a good innovation management system provides tools to review, store, and further process the submitted ideas. Some of these systems also allow companies to customize the appearance of the system so that it looks like an internally developed solution.

What are the main benefits of an innovation management system?

• The comments on submitted ideas are not limited to criticism and support; they can also suggest improvements such as ways to avoid pitfalls, or changes that would increase the idea’s value. For an innovation manager, the volume of comments on an idea is a good indicator of its potential. The system also helps identify controversial ideas; these ideas always deserve a closer inspection, as game-changing innovation is always controversial.

• Innovation managers can use an innovation management system to run targeted innovation campaigns (e.g., “How to make our business more sustainable?” or “How to improve the service quality for our customers?”). During such a campaign, employees can submit ideas and comment on them.

• Most importantly — and this is particularly helpful in Asian cultures with their strong emphasis on seniority — an innovation management system allows young, creative employees to directly communicate ideas to an innovation management team, thus bypassing middle management where the focus is on short-term results rather than on creating “the next big thing.”

What are the cons of innovation management systems?

• Innovation management systems are typically adopted only by a small percentage of the workforce. Moreover, the number of contributions usually goes down over time as some employees lose their initial enthusiasm, leaving only the hard-core contributors.

• All of these innovation management systems privilege written communication, which disadvantages those who, like me, find it de-energizing to innovate without face-to-face interaction.

• At Thinkergy, our experience in working with clients has shown that the best ideas are almost always combinations of individual ideas, or variations on truly wild ideas; only rarely can a single idea stand alone. However, standalone ideas are the norm in an innovation management system; while they may be improved through online comments, they typically are not combined with other ideas. And few employees will dare submit a truly crazy idea to an innovation management system.

• The innovation tools provided with modern innovation management systems are very limited. In essence, most systems offer a database to store and process ideas, as well as tools to evaluate and identify those ideas. What they don’t offer is tools for exploring innovation challenges, support for creating both interesting and wild ideas, or a means to combine and transform those ideas to make them more meaningful.

If you are an innovation manager or the leader of a medium-to-large corporation, then seriously consider investing in an innovation management system to support your innovation efforts. However, realize that such a system will, by itself, be limited, particularly when it comes to creating energy, fun, passion, and a human touch.

To build a truly innovative culture in your firm, using an innovation management system will help, but you must complement it with innovation training and people-centered innovation projects to instill the spirit of human-centered innovation into your workforce.

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2011. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the same title on 12 May 2011.