Redesigning Idea Management

Over several months, a coaching team and I facilitated the process of redesigning the idea management for a very large German company. The project was about rethinking the complete approach to contributing, evaluating and pursuing ideas in a corporation. As in other projects, the coaching approach was built around regular structured workshops that were mainly there to work through the converging phases of the design process. I’m describing this structure in more detail here.

In regards to the project content, it was really fascinating to learn how an idea management is something that comes with such good intentions but yet has the potential to make so many people just incredibly unhappy. Users were…
…unhappy with handling the interface of the idea management itself (now that’s fixable)
…unhappy with the requirements of contributing an idea
…unhappy when they feel their idea is sitting around and doesn’t move forward
…unhappy and afraid their idea might get “leaked” or be stolen
…unhappy if they are reviewers and have to deal with unclear ideas
…unhappy when they have to contribute more info about the idea
…unhappy when they get a reward and they feel it should have been more
…unhappy if someone else gets a reward and they don’t.

So, not really an easy design challenge but nice and complex. In our research on alternative approaches, I was really intrigued by the idea of Adobe Kickbox.

(HPI Academy)