It’s been a while. My apologies to those who have enjoyed my past articles. Hopefully I can get back into a routine and make the time to share a few more of my thoughts of Crowdsourcing Innovation. So where to start – well I have many ideas here, I’ve even written a bit of track list of topics. I even found my old list from the last time I logged off on things I’d been developing. I may have to see if I can pick 1 or 2 of those up along the way. Anyway, enough explaining let’s get to the topic of “Ideas on a Shelf”.

This one hit me again recently as I reflected on the dilemma for Innovation Teams to discover good ideas, develop them into concepts and in turn create their business cases.  Now this sounds like an appropriate course of action as part of any Innovation Process, however, what I have often seen is that the business has not been aligned to take them forwards.

It is not the ideas themselves. They are good. The concepts have been developed; good work has been undertaken. The Business Cases have been diligently prepared and then presented.  It is just at this point the things that are required are essentially fundamentally missing in the business including:

• (Timely) Strategic Alignment (together with)
• Committed Ownership (and importantly)
• Dedicated Funding & Resourcing

Now this sounds implausible. Surely the ideas were strategically aligned to the business? We have identified the strategic owners, heck we’ve even pitched to them, and they supported them. We know there is funding available to invest and we can find the resources needed (or so we have been told).

However, this is the rub. The Strategic Plan is currently at capacity. The Strategic Owner does not have the bandwidth to add this to their portfolio, at least now and the ability to unlock the funding and rustle up the significant resources requires something else critical to be paused.

At best, the ideas are delayed until these conditions change or at worst, they end up on being parked indefinitely. Then as time moves on, conditions and priorities change in the business and these ideas can fall foul of having a virtual expiration date and are disregarded for more timely things that need to be developed.

So, what have we learned along the way to avoid good ideas being put on the shelf.

Strategically align the call to action for ideas (aka Innovation Challenges) to the business needs, the leaders who own and are committed to taking them forwards in-line with their development calendars. This is often the check and balance that is missed. Then we are better positioned to engage the crowd in a more timely fashion to help bring fresh and diverse thinking to add to the core group vs. bringing ideas that are too late to the party. Now this assumes we are handing ideas/concepts over to the business to develop. It maybe that The Innovation Team needs to run with them further and take things to at least a Pilot Stage before things are handed over. However, if that is the case the business still needs to be aligned to then support their scaling/commercialisation post pilot. Otherwise we end up shelving pilots vs. ideas, which isn’t that much better.

One last thought that is worth mentioning, this scheduled approach to capturing ideas does create a concern from business leaders that they might miss a great idea that is discovered outside of this cycle. That is possible and can be easily mitigated by creating the capability to capture and align those ideas to the next planning cycle. It is worth sharing that I have rarely seen a single idea come in, without comparison (it might be good but is it the better than others), that the business changes course and gets behind. It is not to say it cannot happen but the odds are much better when lots of comparative ideas are captured together that allows the best from best to be advanced.