Innovation Arena – prerequisites: Transparency of ideas

We discussed a lot about the course of ideas in the last two or so years with many people from different areas, domains and background. We all agree more or less that creating ideas is far easier than making ideas visible and transparent – especially to perception by the management of organization where ideas can be feed with resources to turn ideas into innovations.

Visibility and transparency of ideas is important to discuss, compare, enhance, nurture and to communicate agree and confirm ideas.

The question is: what is a suitable solution to present an idea?

We recommend a combination of:

• A physical pinboard (This is the most important thing)
• A public innovation space in your company (the bridge between the south and the north floor in your headquarter, a part of your companies public café space)
• using graphical elements (put the maturity icon on top left ;-)
• using structured elements like the Osterwalder Business Canvas (see http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/). We really recommend the Osterwalder Business canvas as a very focused way to present an idea or innovation. For freaks: there is even an iPad App to generate an electronic version.
• providing space on the pinboard (with cards and markers to add feedback when passing by)

Present ideas on a physical pinboard

 

Of course every single ideas will be as well (hopefully) registered and presented electronically at some intranet location. This internet location should be easily found by all of your employees as well with the chance to give feedback. The idea owner is responsible for the information on this page. He is the driver of his idea.

 

But the most important thing is the physical pinboard. The idea owner creates the pinboard. His craftsmanship will present the idea ideally in a format so that it is easily understood. Motivation his peers to discuss in front of the pinboard he will get feedback to enhance the idea. He will place the pinboard at the public innovation space in his company to nurture the ideas to the next maturity level.

We will use these pinboards in our Innovation Arena runs.