Four Problems with Idea Management Systems, Plus How to Fix Them

By Phil Green (@inmagic) Mar 21, 2011 Comments

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Innovation is crucial to any business in today’s global economy. Companies are in a continuous hunt for better ways to capture, cultivate and capitalize on ideas. The team that can bring the best ideas to market first wins. That’s the essence of innovation.

Today, one of the most exciting areas for managers responsible for this is idea management systems. These systems help companies collect, manage and leverage the creative ideas from customers and internal people to drive innovation.

Sounds great. Here’s the reality. Like any product category, not all idea management systems are created equal. Especially in business-to-business markets, where a product management team is in place and wants to use the ideation system to generate and manage product enhancements, current idea management systems are sorely lacking.

Problems, Solutions

Here are four problems I see many of these systems having and suggestions for how to fix them.

Problem: It’s hard to keep the system clean

Idea management systems emphasize crowdsourcing. They are based on the notion that the crowd — external customers and internal subject-matter experts — will promote good ideas and push bad ones aside. In other words, “the cream will rise to the top.” But nearly all product managers know this doesn’t always happen. Bad ideas often mix with good ones, and become noise that makes the system hard to use.

For example, in our experience with a major U.S. retailer, we found the company had thousands of ideas in its idea management system. Unfortunately, many ideas were redundant with other ideas, and worse still, many of the ideas were for items already provided by the company. In fact, one of the submitted ideas stated, "Please clean up the idea community. There is way too much crap in here. I can't find the interesting ideas.”

Solution: Moderation, triaging

Product managers should be able to review submitted ideas and decide whether to publish them before they are viewable to users. This lets product managers delete bad ideas and junk, preventing the system from being clogged with noise that can develop due to crowdsourcing. Product managers should also dedupe submissions, and keep submissions that aren’t feature requests, such as bug reports, out of the system.

In addition, during this moderation step, product managers should be empowered to clarify an idea or fix misspellings, etc. Product managers should also be able to further tag and publish good ideas in custom-created categories, such as product X or Y. This organizes ideas and focuses users on reviewing and acting upon high-quality ideas. Moderation should also support publishing ideas in multiple categories, because they can often apply to myriad situations.

Problem: Finding relevant ideas is hard

With most ideation systems, there is no control over the idea submission process. Users and product managers are bombarded with ideas, and often get so bogged down looking through them that they miss good ones or run out of time to review all of them. In these situations, users need to be able to filter and sort ideas effectively after they are submitted. Unfortunately, most systems lack useful advanced search capabilities. After running a search, users (product managers as well as customers) must still manually search their results to find what they really want, which can be time-consuming.

Users of ideation systems usually want to know more than what the top five ideas are or what the last five submitted ideas were. They want to make sure that they see the new and innovative ideas that have not yet caught on. But if searching is only keyword-based, then good ideas can easily be lost within the system, never to be seen again.