Front End Innovation Needs a Back End

The front end of innovation needs a effective back end system to nurture ideas, manage research projects, and commercialize the best market opportunities. ...

... "Without the back end of innovation - the capacity to effectively screen ideas, align them with strategy, allocate resources to them and manage them successfully ... " ...

Via Blogging Innovation: Ideas

Design Thinking the Climate Change Challenge

Crowdsourcing, ideation, and design thinking about a challenging problem ...

... "Living Climate Change is a place where the most defining challenge of our time is explored through design thinking. " ...

Via Living Climate Change: Actionable Ideas

Shampoo or Conditioner, Which is Better

Life is full of dilemmas. And, that's a good thing. Be prepared to achieve the appropriate balance in your innovation portfolio. Try a few scenario plans for good measure. And, get comfortable when these natural tensions present themselves. ...

... "A common mistake is to reduce innovation because you do not have enough R&D resources to develop the ideas. The irony of this dilemma is that you can actually accelerate development by spending more time on ideating. " ...

Via Innovation in Practice: Dilemmas

Personal Innovation Preserves Creativity

Forecasting Innovation

While innovation isn't quite deterministic, you can reverse engineer the size of an innovation portfolio across the various stage-gates necessary to sustain future revenue from new products. This should provide you with insight on the number of new ideas that need to be generated or the number of product trials needed. Visibility into the innovation portfolio and your historical performance is valuable information for managing business success. ...

... "Break these annual revenue targets down over a mix of products, new and existing, in each year. Some firms call this a revenue cascade or revenue waterfall. " ...

Via Innovation in Practice: Mapping Innovation

Idea Greenhouse with Community Prioritization

Here's interesting model for incorporating customer input into product development and allowing the community to drive priorities. ...

... "Daptiv is now making the Greenhouse available to its entire customer base of more than 100,000 users. The beta allowed Daptiv to fine-tune the forum and gauge initial customer reactions, which have been overwhelmingly positive. As the rest of the Daptiv community contributes to the Greenhouse forum, Daptiv anticipates that time-to-innovation will decrease as product innovation is prioritized by customer need and features are expediently introduced through seasonal product updates. " ...

Via Daptiv: Customer Participation in Product Innovation

Idea Management Software

Here's an opportunity to participate in innovation software trial. ...

... "interested in working with our Incubator software which we will release this week (July 21, 2008) as a beta trial. " ...

Via Innovate on Purpose: Idea Management Software Beta Trial

Need Ideas?

Start digging at the Idea Sandbox for inspiration ...

... "Take the problem and try reversing it. " ...

Via Idea Sandbox: The Big Dig

Grow Ideas into Projects

Create a project incubator. Sprinkle some funding on your seeds and see which ones grow. Prune your plants. And, water your best prospects to grow the strongest trees. Read on for tips on incubating ideas into projects. ...

... "Pruning the project incubator is an especially important aspect of developing ideas. Ideas change over time, and some even turn out to be duds. " ...

Via LifeDev: Grow Your Ideas

Mindmap Productivity Tips

Browser and desktop tips for ideating in real-time and mapping later. ...

... "MindMeister, a web based tool for creating mind maps online, provides some very unique options for capturing and inserting ideas into an existing mind map without having to load the map. " ...

Via Digital Inspiration: Capture Ideas For Mindmapping

Interactive Surfaces for Teams

Continuing along the idea generation train of thought ... Check out this interactive brainstorming surface. ...

Sit Up and Ideate

Ever see that IBM commercial on ideating? Instead of laying down ... How about sitting up for some word-play. ...

Check out this idea generator