Ten questions to assess your organization’s idea environment

One key to a successful audit of an organization’s idea environment is the starting point. It’s critical that everyone on the audit team understand the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of the current idea capture and management systems…and the impact that has on the organization’s idea portfolio.

The goal is to start on a common page, with everyone in agreement that there is room for improvement in the current systems.

I’ve learned over the years that a quick introspective look at the organization’s systems is more effective at getting to the right starting point than any introductory lecture I can give to the team. So now I always start with a “Ten Questions About You” approach that works wonders.

The list of questions I’m currently using appears below. An open discussion of these questions has never failed to get folks thinking about improving the systems and tools an organization uses to capture and manage ideas.

1. If one of your organization’s inventive personnel had a “great idea”* this morning, how long would it take before you knew about it?

2. How confident are you that your current systems would actually capture that “great idea?”

3. If you had a “great idea” this morning, what tool(s) would you use to capture it for the organization?

4. After you capture your “great idea,” what do you do with it next?

5. How many purpose-specific idea capture tools does your organization provide to inventive personnel?

6. Does your organization provide any specialized idea capture tools that are specifically designed for key inventive personnel?

7. What inputs does your organization provide to foster an idea rich environment?

8. Which department and/or employee(s) is/are responsible for processing captured ideas?

9. Are captured ideas indexed in a manner that allows inventive personnel to review the current and past ideas of others?

10. How many patent applications did your organization file last year?

* Note – for this exercise, I usually define a “great idea” as one that has the potential to impact a defined business objective or to create a new opportunity for the organization.

When you first read the list, you might think the last question doesn’t fit with the rest. While it does have a distinctly different flavor than questions 1 through 9, I assure you it serves the common purpose of the list – assessing an organization’s idea environment to get folks thinking about improvement.

I added #10 after spotting a trend from the “ten questions” exercise. After answering the questions from an earlier version of the list and acknowledging that their idea capture and management systems were ineffective, business leaders were quick to proudly point to random statistics about their patent portfolio. Number of patent applications filed and patents issued in the previous year were most common.

“We filed 300 patent applications last year, we must be capturing a lot of ideas.”

To this I’d respond with questions like

“But did you file the right 300 applications?”

or

“Are you confident that those applications include all of the ‘great ideas’ from last year?”

This provided a natural transition to one of my takeaway lessons for the audits – many organizations confuse patent metrics for idea metrics, and doing so provides a false sense of security that all is well in the organization’s idea environment.

So I revised the list to include question #10 to prompt that discussion. It also gives the business leaders an easy question to answer after struggling with the stumpers of 1 through 9. Most show relief when they get to #10 -

“That’s easy…300! I just reviewed the report last week…..Next year we’re going to file 400!”

So much work to do…..

This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 11:05 am and is filed under idea management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.