You’ve Got Innovative Ideas – Now What?

When it comes to growing a business, or even just keeping it afloat, companies rely on innovation. At the heart of innovation are creative ideas that add value. These ideas can include anything from developing new products or services to reach new consumers, crafting a marketing campaign to offer a unique brand experience, or streamlining internal processes to cut costs and reduce waste.

If there's one thing that small businesses have an abundance of it's ideas. But how do you keep track of all of them? More importantly, how do you decide which ones to pursue and invest in, and which ones to discard or shelve for later?

There are a number of cost-effective mechanisms that small businesses can use to track their ideas, along with tools and processes you can put in place to better evaluate ideas for investment purposes. Let's look at a few:

Stop Losing Ideas
The key to any successful innovation program is to make it easy for people to submit ideas and build on them over time. Thanks to the Web, there are numerous free channels through which you can do this quickly and easily. If you're ready to get going, you don't have to wait around for an enterprise-wide idea management system. Set up a private blog on Wordpress, TypePad, or Blogger, and invite each member of your team to contribute. Alternatively, you can create a simple Google Spreadsheet and invite others to collaborate on it. The benefit of doing it on the Web is that you can tag ideas, so they're easy to categorize and find when the time is right. Additionally, Web-based channels facilitate real-time collaboration.

Check out the American Cancer Society's Online Lab for inspiration. It's a simple system – but one that allows people to leave thoughts and feedback on the various ideas the ACS is exploring.

Objectively Evaluate Ideas
In this tough economic climate, it's more important than ever to prioritize and make strategic decisions that will ensure the success of your business in the long-run. With constrained resources – cash, time, and people – you can't afford to make mistakes and must strive to mitigate waste as much as possible. Successful companies employ tools that enable them to sift through and objectively evaluate the ideas presented to them.

Companies without evaluation tools often say 'yes' to more projects than they can afford, and fail to exercise appropriate caution. They become reluctant to drop projects and rely on instinct and emotion to evaluate them. To avoid this, develop a basic "idea screener" for your organization, and use it with your team to evaluate ideas and sort out the must-dos from the maybes. Your screener should allow anyone in your organization to score ideas based on qualities such as:

• Strategic Fit: Does this idea fit within our current innovation strategy?
• Feasibility: Does this idea have a reasonable likelihood of success in the marketplace?
• Competitive Advantage: Will it give you the ability to stay ahead of competitors?

There are many more criteria you can include to customize the screener to your business goals or industry trends. Set aside time to review the screener with your team to ensure it's robust enough to objectively weed out ideas that just aren't a good fit for your organization.

Employing these tools and processes to help you capture ideas from your employees, and determine which ones are the best to flesh out further, will enable you to focus on initiatives that will drive your business forward and keep you ahead of the curve.