Idea management is an approach to creating and evaluating ideas that help improve an organization. In the product management context, idea management refers to the systematic framework to collect, analyze, and prioritize ideas to enhance existing products or develop new ones. A formalized, structured routine for creating, evaluating, and performing ideas to drive innovation and large-scale organizational change is what to get in sideways 6.

Idea management is simple, flexible, and tested thoroughly, hugely transformative.

Three elements of idea management

Idea management has three elements required to produce excellent ideas, namely:

1. Culture. Making a culture that values and encourages the contribution of suggestions, feedback, insights, and observations, no matter how inconsequential or small.
2. System. Provide a receptacle to catch and store all thoughts, intuitive to use and easy to access.
3. Process. Create a clear process to reasonably and rationally filter through these ideas against clearly defined priorities and business goals.

Why is it essential?

The market is continually changing, which you should be as well. Idea management is an effective answer to various significant business challenges:

• Feedback fatigue. The thing about traditional feedback is it is imprecise and messy. It follows negative experiences and is rarely solution-focused.
• Idea plateau. Many ideas are in the mix, yet there are simply never reaching the key decision-makers. As priorities stretched and businesses grow, communication channels are more complex, which means more ideas get lost.
• Bystander effect. It refers to the diminished likelihood of people responding to an emergency if they think someone else doing it. It happens in a business when people feel they don’t have influence over the result of the product or service, and never see any point that contributes beyond what is necessary.
• Distant management. Staff management is an essential part of idea management that taps into valuable insights from the employees that otherwise be lost in the daily routine. These are the observations made by people living and breathing the function of your business that leads to direct disruptive solutions to many biggest issues of the company.

Who will benefit from idea management?

Ideas are not only for senior management. Tapping into ideas from colleagues will benefit, all departments in the business. Idea management can help the business’s departments:

• Marketing department
• Finance department
• HR department
• Customer service team

A robust idea management strategy can support every area of the business:

1. Increase efficiency and improve processes
2. Boost engagement and employee morale
3. Create new products, services, and revenue streams
4. Increase profits
5. Beat the competition
6. Increase collaboration and facilitate internal communication
7. Identify and help execute cost savings

Implementing an idea management process helps your business set goals, ideate, motivate, implement, evaluate, collaborate, and recognize. If you are handling staff or employees, you must need integrated idea management.