Behold! Free Online Idea Management Software is coming

Dear friends and innovation practitioners,

From our perspective, free idea management tools are everywhere, but in poor quality and bound by countless limitations.

So Good and Free are a scarce combination when it comes to choosing right Free online idea management solution.

Last couple of days, we encountered news about the Beta version of the tool called Innovation Cloud. Behind that enterprise stands solid innovation background of  the DataStation – company from Belgium.

Innovation Cloud free idea management banner_960px

What we gathered as an intel, this tool will be different. As it will offer all means necessary to gather and manage ideas.

Their aim is apparently S&M companies and teams, so limits are complimenting that goal – 15 users, 100 ideas tied to one free account.

They promise highly affordable premium packages, but we do not know the prices still.

Main goal: To liberate idea management field and give small market players access to good quality idea management software.

We wish them all the luck in that goal and will come back with the review once the tool is online.

Looking forward to it.

Kind regards,

IP

How to Keep People Engaged – Consulting with Technology

DataStation with Consulting
Starting the innovation initiative and launching it in an organization is just a tip of the ice berg. What happens afterwards is the real challenge.
As momentum starts to fade, you have to ask yourself:
Have I reached enough people?
Were my efforts enough to sustain innovation as essential part of organizational culture?

Will people keep coming back to share little bit of themselves?

We will explore the possibilities of using known innovation elements as fabric to sustainable innovation management.

Familiar Story

You got the job to connect people with the innovation strategy you developed with the management.

Top management recognized the essential importance of the innovation management. They did it because they want to grow, or they are in danger. The reason is not important, it is important that the change is now alive and has support of the top level.

You set the goal, set the milestones and gathered the I-team.

The battle can begin.

Management winds in your back are pushing you forward, I-team is highly motivated to work as all they are hand picked to drive the initiative forward. You organized few workshop, got some people on board. You managed to collect some ideas, one or two got implemented.

You gave a SOW report, results report and you shake a hand of your employer and ride on to the Sunset towards next Challenge.

Two months later, you are called back to the company (if you are lucky). Initiative withered and died. You have to kick start it again, only now you lost the initial momentum… no one wants to be part of it. Support from I-team is diminished, Management is frustrated and wants a quick and painless fix, but you can’t deliver.

All odds are against you. You have only couple of months to deliver some results, only now, they must last.

www.datastation.com

How can you avoid this situation? What is long term solution that will bring high motivation,  innovation culture and fertile ground for ideas to grow and flourish on the long run?

That puzzle are we going to tackle and complete in this article.

What is missing?

You had it right from the start. You had clear, achievable goals, motivated I-team and top management support.  You organized workshops, got people interested, created some momentum and harvested some ideas. They were even implemented. But the structure you nourished can live only for so long. You made a child and left him to roam without support.

What you need is the software tool to act as your Brilliant assistant to bridge that gap and to sustain the initiative once you ride on.

Combining your skills with a software tool will result in a same effect as a Doctors operation: Major first intervention with occasional follow ups.

You probably know this already, but please keep on reading to see where is the value for you precisely.

Tool as a Brilliant Assistant

Our experience is that short term interventions are not working. Tools do.

With good tool you can create innovation friendly environment directly from your mind to online community. In the right hands it will support, sustain and maintain all innovation initiatives activities towards innovation goals.

 

Keep in mind one thing. Tools are there to support Innovation initiative, they cannot harvest innovation potential without people, their collaborative effort, coordination and monitoring.

This is where you as a consultant fit in perfectly.

Online tools will empower you to scale, to save time and to service more clients in the form of micro consulting.

You will achieve more clients and more meaningful and lasting business relationships. That is the main value of the assisting online tools.

How can online tool help you?

Transparency

Clear process, Clear roles, Clear goals and milestones are essential for any innovation initiative to succeed. If people do not understand what they are supposed to do in which step, and what should be the outcome of their actions they will fall out of the train on the first stop.

DataStation Metrics

Tool: People can actually see the process visualized. They know how many phases there are, what is expected in which and what is final outcome. They know who participates, what is their contribution and they can compare it to the contribution of others.

Incentives

Everyone needs some incentive to keep doing something that is often regarded as “extra work” on the beginning.

They are different for all, but there is one general point to get people on board: When employees see that organization values their ideas on real problems, they will be more willing to engage in innovation going forward.

www.datastation.com

Tool provides large motivation possibilities to engage innovative people to act:

  1. Alarming, notification system that calls everyone to action at the right moment.
  2. Transparent idea status and execution results with lavish congrats message
  3. Improvement of the employee position and image within the company itself
  4. Influence with gaming aspect of the tool, as they come to raise their ranking, collect rewards and compete. Public recognition with Innovator of the month often raises participants sense of contribution.
  5. Some come to the tool as it is set as a must in corporate policy.
  6. Ability to resolve challenges as part of the Team.

Most valuable ones are those who see online tool as a way to affect ordinary way of working and whose only reward is actual transparent execution of their ideas.

Collaboration

Without collaborative effort which is often very hard to coordinate and sustain, innovation initiative is doomed. Nurturing employee collaboration and channeling it onto specific challenges is tiresome work, but necessary if you wish to harvest good ideas and to have enough to dig out the golden ones for implementation.

Without collaboration and knowledge exchange, ideation is just reduced to suggestion box, with no  real community test.

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Tools are often designed to compliment three essential aspects of the innovation management (3C’s): Collaboration, Communication and Coordination.

With ability to keep conversations in context of the idea for a long time, tools are very valuable lessons learned and knowledge archives. With intelligent notification system, feed and social elements IM tools are becoming social collaboration environments where all the right ingredients are mixed to gain hopefully very good results.

Support

Aligned with the innovation initiative goals. It must be clear to everyone involved what is at stake. Almost always, it is company’s future and survival. All should know that their activities are essential in order for company to survive and thrive.

Tools are there to help us implement our strategy. They are designed to sustain and compliment its meandric course with good flexibility options and usable simple to implement interventions. They are used as a centralized hub to collect the data, transform it to usable information and create new possibilities.

Tools are ideal for long term innovation management.

Time

If by corporate policy you managed to spare a few hours for employees personal projects, ideas and innovation it might not be enough. It will all crumble is you expect all their ideas will come on work. They are coming at any moment. When we are under pressure, under shower, on the road, on the beach…

cloud

Several hours a week are often not enough, even if employees used it well. We need to empower them to contribute from their beds, roadtrips, even showers.

Cloud technology and Online available tools can bridge that gap. Any time, from anywhere. Office walls are only a suggestion. Especially if we bring open innovation into mix.

Metrics

On the tool you can track various aspects of innovation performance, create reports and turn unorganized data into real usable information. To gain real time visual and metric insight into the results of the innovation initiative is something CEO’s are keen to have right now. Learning from your past mistakes, gives you power to raise from the necessary failures and turn them to opportunities on the next run.

business-graphs-3D1

Symbiosis needed – Consulting with Technology

 

Short term interventions are not enough. Why put all that hard work in creating excellent innovation strategy, when it will crumble after you leave office behind.

Combining  consultants expertise with technology, we gain the possibility to affect organizations on a level  never seen before with the same resources as you have now.

If you build it, They will come

Reach out to possibilities, find your partnering tool.

New Frontier: Star Trek Replicator is Reality?

Star Trek Replicator

I came upon this post on the Web:

Feeding the Final Frontier: 3-D Printers Could Make Astronaut Meals and couldn’t resist to notice the similarity to Star Trek Replicator.

Is this prelude to the famous Replicator ?

Amazing what people can achieve in technology, and that movie industry sets the goals.

What amazing invent do you think will be realized after Replicator?

Teleporting?

What is the difference between innovation management and change management?

innovation_change

Hello again,This post is directed to all those who are new in the innovation field that will definitely be confused with overlapping nature of these two broad terms – Innovation and Change.

To shed some light on the differences between them I will first deliver you their definitions, and then with some effort, main differences that will help you understand your standpoint.

DEFINITIONS:

 

INNOVATION MANAGEMENT is the discipline of managing innovations. It can be used to develop  product/service, process or business model innovation starting from creative idea to launch.

The focus of innovation management is to allow the organization to respond to an external or internal opportunity, and use its creative efforts to introduce new ideas, processes or products to reach market demands.

Common tools include brainstorming, virtual prototyping, product lifecycle management, idea management, TRIZ, stage-gate process, project management, product line planning and portfolio management. (source: wikipedia)

 

CHANGE MANAGEMENT is an approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state A to a desired future state B.

It involves the process, tools and techniques to manage the people-side of change to achieve a required business outcome.

Change management’s goal is to minimize the change impacts on workers and avoid distractions. (source: http://www.change-management.com)

 

Having this cleared, let’s move onto the differences.

 

Main differences between Innovation and Change management:

1. KNOWN VS UKNOWN

Change management largely deals with a lot of known’s, on the other hand innovation management deals with a lot of unknown’s. Every creative ideas has a certain known beginning, but not a known end. In change management point A and point B are well known, it is just a matter of good execution to bring the change to point B.

2. VISION VS EXECUTION

Innovation management is tied to detecting and developing new areas as organizational goals in terms of Strategy and Vision development, whereas Change management is tied to implementation of such a Vision. An innovation is a disruptive change that will challenge your core capabilities and your core rigidness. While, Change management will demand you to convince your people to follow through a chosen path among different alternatives that have been pondered. Although they seem to intersect in some points the skills sets required are different.

3. CHANGE VS INNOVATION – A change does not necessarily mean innovation, while innovation always means the change.

 

QUESTION: IS CHANGE MANAGEMENT JUST A BYPRODUCT OF INNOVATION MANAGEMENT?

 

 

Public education VS Creativity – Can you break the rules?

Creativity

Last year I started poll on LinkedIn addressing influence of Public education on our creativity. I posted well known Ken Robinson video and waited for the poll answers.

I was taken by surprise how much this topic is hot, and what contributions were left.

In this post I wish to share with you the brilliance of people involved in the discussion.

Enjoy!

“You have to know the rules before you can break them. All things will stifle your creativity or stimulate it to a certain degree and so in that sense, public education won’t kill creativity, but it will guide it towards something which is an acceptable norm within the constraints of established thinking. “

Ian Furniss • I think It’s a difficult question to give a definitive answer to. To some extent there will always be a need for formal education and a saying comes to mind which shows that “You have to know the rules before you can break them”. Could you be a Photoshop pro for example without actually knowing how to use it? No. You could certainly learn to use it without formal education of course, but that takes time and so I tend to see structured learning having an advantage up to a certain point. Where that point changes is in where you mention, thinking inside or outside boxes. Consider something like Partizan and Red Star, if you support one or the other it’s highly unlikely that you will convince an opposing supporter that yours is the team more worthy of support. That goes the same for ideas. When you have had a lifetime of indoctrination into a certain way of thinking, no matter how much you implore someone to “think outside the box”, what you are really looking for is for them to think within the constrains of your box. Could you have convinced Pavarotti that his talents were wasted and he should have been singing heavy rock? The only way to have free creativity is to abandon formal or public education and teach yourself. Even then, that will be limited by your own life experiences, the things which you like or dislike, each of which will influence your direction. At that point the conclusion I come to is that all things will stifle your creativity or stimulate it to a certain degree and so in that sense, public education won’t kill creativity, but it will guide it towards something which is an acceptable norm within the constraints of established thinking. As a caveat, I should add, it is still possible to do something that is seen as original within those constraints, but it is more likely to be an amalgamation or extension of already existing ideas i:e was rock & roll a new idea or was it an adaptation of R&B, blues, jazz, etc?

 “One should be careful with phrases like that old silly stuff of “deschooling society” the very expression of narcissistic intellectualism. Education is good by itself, schools too. We can certainly make them better and better.” 

Gabriel A. Ramirez • The question itself is tricky. In some way implies that education kills creativity. It puts education under suspect. A much better question is daniel Vauldrin’s and, perhaps an still a better one is: What ca one do to help education and educators to enhance, through educational systems, creativity even and more? One should be careful with phrases like that old silly stuff of “deschooling society” the very expression of narcissistic intellectualism. Or such a good music with lyrics that goes like this “… We don’t need no education, we don´t need school control. Teacher, teacher lives the kid alone” The authors of that music did never ever imagine that with that lyrics they were so massively contributing to today overabundance of “bricks in the wall” all over the world and specially in Britain. Education is good by itself, schools too. We can certainly make them better and better.

Job hiring: “Much emphasis has been put on their having a degree, and less on what they bring to the table in regards to real experience, expertise, skills, and abilities.“
Melanie Edwards • I am very fascinated by all the comments in this poll. I appreciate the broad spectrum of backgrounds and personalities that LinkedIn brings together for discussions such as this. I agree with much of what I am reading, and had my own “filters” in place when I first commented. For one, thinking in terms just the American public school system. Going beyond that, and outside of other “filters” i had in place, I can certainly appreciate the comments of Ian, Michelle and Vasco regarding stifling creativity in order to be compliant with a structure (my paraphrasing) — but want to take it further. In the USA, there are many people who have not completed their formal education to the point of securing a degree, for a variety of reasons. Some, may pick it back up later in life, some may not, again for a variety of reasons. Unfortunately, the persons who are not degreed (I refuse to say uneducated, as that is NOT definitive in all cases) are most often “weeded” out of an interview process for jobs or even promotions, and passed by for someone who has a degree. It is common knowledge, as well, that few people in the USA work in their field of degree anyway. Much emphasis has been put on their having a degree, and less on what they bring to the table in regards to real experience, expertise, skills, and abilities. Our own corporate hiring practices throughout the USA award the people who have conformed to the point of securing a degree (any degree, often), and sometimes overlook the person who can offer the most to the company’s bottom line, top line, mission, and whole environment. IMHO.

 

“Freedom to self-determination leads to more creative behaviour!”

Ron Broens • Vitomir Rašić already shared the speech from Ken Robinson which explains that the current education set-up is not really supporting the development of creative skills and competencies. But also have a look at Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc . His speech is all about following your passions and making your own decisions for your education. Freedom to self-determination leads to more creative behaviour! The system requires change to become more effective in teaching skills that are more difficult to measure. Stay hungry, stay foolish!

 

“I lost my independence of thought. So, along about 10 years of “professional career”, I ended up seeing that it was exactly those personal traces that were so much frowned upon that were actually valuable in the real world: autonomy of opinion, transversal thinking, imagination… the things I had to keep in a box in order to succeed in academia are the things society actually needs in order to survive and thrive.”

Vasco Névoa • Like Ian, I agree that we are first and foremost the sum of our experiences. Hence we cannot escape the shared experience that is school. It formats us, whether we like school or not. The deeper question is then: shouldn’t we be more than just that sum? We all believe that we should be capable of using all that experience in novel ways, by remixing it and re-contextualizing it, and we see the world becomes better when we do it. The problem is that this creative thinking implies “doing things differently”. Stepping outside the norm. And being different, like Michelle pointed out, is usually frowned upon in the academic world. It starts in the kindergarten and goes all the way up to college. If you act differently, you’re either weird or cheating. And this is one point where I’d like to make a positive criticism: not all cheating is bad. Some of it is quite creative. Some of it is creative enough to make a difference in the capacity for survival in extreme or unusual conditions (like, say, a global crisis?) Personally, I was always the “different” kind of student. Mostly I was just weird and sometimes loud-mouthed, and sometimes I felt I had to cheat to survive like anyone else. It was a very long and very tough fight, and by the time I finished college I thought I had won: I knew the system and more or less how to navigate it with moderate success. I kept my imagination to myself and just concentrated on being “compatible”, which made me an excellent asset for any company who was looking for a robotic humanoid to expand their production line. But in truth, I had lost. I lost my independence of thought. So, along about 10 years of “professional career”, I ended up seeing that it was exactly those personal traces that were so much frowned upon that were actually valuable in the real world: autonomy of opinion, transversal thinking, imagination… the things I had to keep in a box in order to succeed in academia are the things society actually needs in order to survive and thrive. I’ve been investing in my old self for the past few years, trying to recover that imaginative child that didn’t take “no” as an acceptable option. The good news is that I’m slowly getting there. The bad news is that there is a critical point of no return, at least apparently, and that others are not as lucky. Some of my classmates fared very well in academia, but very poorly outside. They forgot how to think independently, and worst of all they lost their self-confidence. I know some other people that just gave up their mind, transformed into a neural message recorder, a knowledge sponge, and are now capable of memorising just about anything you throw at them, but are utterly incapable of criticising what they have learned. These are the casualties of the “education war”, for we are at war with our nature when we force ourselves to memorise something we don’t even like. And they happen because school is a massive logistic system, and most people believe it must be managed as such, leaving no room for individuality — that would be too complex to manage. Criticising constructively, I believe that “cheating” must be revised. The system must welcome some forms of cheating. For example, if a student blatantly copies another student’s test by peeking over the shoulder, that’s plain stealing and no benefit comes from it. But if two or three students work together to split the heavy curriculum between themselves and share their knowledge during the exams, that’s actually very organised and competitive team work. The kind of successful team work that companies kill for. This is another aspect I think the schooling system has to seriously improve in the short term: promote self-reliance and individuality via team work. Less individual exams, more team challenges. And more group learning. Cramming 30 to 50 kids into the same classroom in front of a teacher is not group learning; they have to be able to experience the subject freely, to discuss, to debate, to contradict, to find the logic behind it — TOGETHER. This is what takes people to finding their place in society — a place where they feel useful, not the first place where they can survive. Like Melanie says, there are some fantastic teachers out there, I had some. Unfortunately they are fighting a loosing battle against the majority of bosses, colleagues, students, and parents. This positivism of believing in the individual student and bringing out its best personal features is something that has to be institutionalized, or we will just keep making humanoid robots. Which are defective by nature, in that role. Some of the “alternative” northern european and north-american schools have achieved this goal. But why are they viewed as the exception instead of an excellent example to follow? Because of logistics. It is far easier to control a system with a simplistic rule set, than it is to care for quality.

 

“My final thought is that creativity and originality have to be valued. The older a student gets, the more difficult it is for that student to offer original insights without being laughed at. After being ridiculed a few times by peers, that student will most likely keep her mouth shut the next time she has an idea. It doesn’t matter how much encouragement she gets from her teacher, she will not share it. After a while, she might even stop getting those ideas. What’s the point anyway? On the other hand, what if students got marks for original ideas or clever ways of finding solutions? What if we really looked at the work in progress and not just the final outcome?”

Michelle Vaudrin • People go to school in the hopes of getting into the university and the program of their choice. So what do American students do to get into university? They study for the SATs. I have never written the SATs, so I would like to know the following: Does the SAT have a section to evaluate creativity? (If it can really be evaluated.) Does the test look at HOW the students got their answers, or is it only the end result that is looked at? As for Canadians, we have to get high grades. To get high grades, you have to give the teacher what the teacher wants. Yes, there are teachers who encourage creativity, curiosity, and spontaneous discussions. Just last week, I was teaching history/geography to grade 5 and 6 students, and we were really into the Canadian Shield and rock formation. I kept looking at my watch worried about not having enough time to finish my lesson. I found myself saying, “Ok, guys. We have to stop this discussion now. We still have all these pages to cover for today.” I felt disgusted with myself afterwards. As a teacher, I constantly feel this pressure to cover the whole government program. I also have the parents to worry about in the private sector. “What did you do in class today Johnny?” Imagine the parents’ faces when they hear, “Oh, we just looked at rocks and talked about them.” My final thought is that creativity and originality have to be valued. The older a student gets, the more difficult it is for that student to offer original insights without being laughed at. After being ridiculed a few times by peers, that student will most likely keep her mouth shut the next time she has an idea. It doesn’t matter how much encouragement she gets from her teacher, she will not share it. After a while, she might even stop getting those ideas. What’s the point anyway? On the other hand, what if students got marks for original ideas or clever ways of finding solutions? What if we really looked at the work in progress and not just the final outcome?

 

My original question was:

Can public education kill our creativity? (http://linkd.in/ehGsqy)

“Can educational frame limit us to thinking just within the “box”? Are we too much influenced by social paradigms that we cannot think outside them? http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms.html “
Vitomir
My question to you:  What can public education do to enhance creativity?