Ideas. They are the path to pain and the road to riches. Well, they are definitely the path to pain, and if you don’t give up because of the pain, maybe riches.
Most of the time, ideas in organisations are parked out of fear. They are sat on for years because it there is no money, no way to drive it forward, no time to have a meeting about it…Nothing happens…The world moves on.
Suddenly an idea placed in the suggestion box a year ago is all over the media. That Friday night over a beer, we get to turn to our co-workers and say… I thought of that idea ages ago and put it in the suggestion box.
Shareholders are screaming as the stock falls and there is now a mad scramble to create a less refined me too version of the competitor product which is now selling in droves on the market.
Creating Ideas and Driving them Forward
The suggestion box is where ideas go to die. More often than not, many organisations do not know how to create an infrastructure for nurturing ideas.
We have all been in those long, uncomfortable, unproductive meetings where the boss needs ideas. People hate it, because you will get maybe one or two ideas from a three-hour session using this method.
When BEAF work with organisations to come up with new ideas during an Innovation Day, we use over 70 idea generating tools and typically generate over 100 ideas in three hours.
Our suggestion box is Pinipa. It is a cloud-based platform which allows us to post all the ideas generated up to the Cloud.
Ideas can be collectively vetted by our clients and shared with their staff. The staff can then vote and comment on each idea with the most successful being turned into projects by line-managers and driven to realisation.
We like Pinipa because it is super simple to use and works really well with our Innovation Days.
Don’t let your suggestion box kill ideas.
For more info on an Innovation Day with BEAF or on the platform Pinipa, get in contact with me by emailing nik@beaf.com.
