Capturing the lightbulb moment!

“Ideas lose themselves as quickly as quail, and one must wing them the minute they rise out of the grass-or they are gone!“

Thomas F Kennedy

Source: Forbes

Ideas are the lifeblood of innovation. If your business is not innovating, it’s unlikely to be in business long term.

The inability of organisations to capture ideas is quite startling. Ideas are not exclusive; every single employee can create ideas that could be very significant in the life of the organisation. Ideas come from people, and they need a culture where ideas are nurtured.

A wonderful Māori whakatauki states:

Poipoia te kakano kia puawai – nurture the seed and it will blossom.  The seed in this case being a good idea.

So, what is an idea anyway?

The Collins dictionary states: –

  1. An idea is a plan, suggestion, or possible course of action.
  2. An idea is an opinion or belief about what something is like or should be like.

Given the above, then everyone is an idea generator. However, like the Kennedy quote ideas will be lost forever without the culture and mechanism to capture and cultivate them into positive business improvements or amazing innovations.

However, I am sure many of you reading this will have experienced the river of positivity from management wanting to capture your ideas, but then with no feedback loop mechanism, the pipeline of ideas and the willingness to suggest ideas dries up like an old riverbed! Even if the culture is strong and you are awash with ideas, without a means to manage the rising tide you can quickly become swamped and unable to cope causing dissatisfaction with the delayed inaction.

Digital Transformation Limited are not culture or people management specialists. We are however pretty good at using digital technology to capture data and automate processes to solve a problem.

We have taken feedback from a range of customers and leading consultants to create an easy to use, configurable and simple to manage tool based on Microsoft O365 to help support organisations with the management of ideas and the innovation pipeline. Plus, you don’t need to pay any additional software licensing costs if you are already users of Microsoft technology (which in NZ is almost all medium to large organisations).

DTL – Idea Hopper

Our solution is called ‘Idea Hopper”

It aims to be your digital reservoir of ideas where your employees can capture, collaborate upon, evaluate, prioritise, and measure ideas in a simple and transparent way.

Used by customers from energy generation to construction consultants, Idea Hopper’s key features include:

  1. The ability for staff to pitch improvement ideas and raise challenges
  2. The ability to track and proactively manage idea progression through various stages to completion
  3. Automated communications to inform stakeholders and deliver an effective feedback loop
  4. The ability for staff to collaborate and manage interests through watchlists
  5. A measurement dashboard to illustrate the value of ideas in the “Hopper”

The benefit that ‘Idea Hopper’ delivers is significant.

Employee Engagement: From a cultural perspective it helps support employee engagement initiatives and its transparency means all levels in the organisation are aware of the ideas.

It enables the business to understand the value it has within its people and can see which areas are the prolific idea generators.

Ideas are measured and reported upon which means the executive group can see the value opportunities within the business and report accordingly.

It generates and captures the spark which is needed to kickstart the innovation process.

After all, people are where ideas come from: –

“Money doesn’t start an idea: it is the idea that starts the money”  

WJ Cameron

Source: Forbes Quotes

If you are interested to learn more contact me – Ben@digitaltransformation.co.nz