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Everyone's got ideas about idea management. Many fields of thought have developed processes, tools, and techniques — but no one's nailed it yet. So I'm working to map the pieces together and make sense of it all.		 Ideas about idea management

A Framework for Idea Management
Essential to business innovation is the ability for an organization to collect, evaluate, and develop new ideas. To do so, an organization must integrate the inputs and activities of various disciplines — marketing, strategy, management, finance, branding, engineering, operations, and others. Adding to the complexities is the amorphous and ambiguous issues of risk, customer acceptance, and the rapidly changing competitive environment.

Many pioneering efforts have been made to make the process of idea management more robust and scientific. These various fronts of development include: brainstorming, idea creation, and idea collection management software and processes; knowledge management tools and databases; portfolio and product planning techniques and software; process management techniques such as Stage Gate™; and even marketplaces intended for the efficient evaluation of ideas.

As more teams and organizations look to systematize and improve their ability to grow and harvest innovative ideas, they lack a means of making sense of the strange mix of the tools, processes, and techniques of idea management. The goal of this research is to survey the existing state of the art in idea management, making sense of idea management as a discipline, and proffering a navigable guide to newcomers and practitioners.
Who's on which frontiers of idea management?
Copyright 2005 Brandon Schauer | last updated: January 2005