Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire

Chapter 6. Picking a Winner Without Looking: IDEA EVALUATION BLOCKAGES

The Key Dangers

• Employees don't completely understand the criteria used for judging ideas and so don't know whether their idea is either wanted or worth submitting.

• Employees don't trust that their idea will receive a fair hearing, so they don't submit it.

• The idea evaluation process is not tolerant of the uncertainty that accompanies truly innovative ideas, and this results in more predictable operational improvement or incremental innovation ideas being funded to the exclusion of more innovative ideas.

• The idea evaluation process is not a gated process, and so ideas that are promising when funded but prove mediocre in execution during the idea development process end up crowding out more promising ideas waiting to get funded.

• The idea evaluation process becomes highly political and participation in the idea generation and submission process suffers as a result.

Overview

The lack of formal idea evaluation policies or transparency on their makeup, plus the lack of clear separation from idea generation, can block innovation output in organizations. Also a problem for innovation projects is the fact that operational improvement projects are often easier to justify because the savings are more apparent to all and more easily measured. Do innovation projects get passed over for operational improvement projects as a result? Do you have innovation assassins in your organization (aka Dr. No)? Has your organization created ...