By: Nirmala Palaniappan
Part 1: The Why
It is believed that Organisations often lose anywhere between 70 and 90% of valuable ideas due to scattered notes, forgotten emails, or lack of follow-up. Many of the ideas that employees have are lost either in the chaos of daily tasks and/or inhibitions and challenges associated with processing ideas from cradle all the way to closure.
Surveys indicate that there are a high volume of overlooked ideas from ground-level employees.
· 82% of employees worldwide have ideas to improve their business, per Sideways 6's State of Employee Ideas report.
· 34% report these ideas are ignored by employers, with only 32% of companies having a clear process to manage them.
· 18% of ideas are never voiced due to fear/inhibitions.
In addition, poor idea systems directly hit financials through missed growth and efficiency.
- Companies lacking strong innovation management see 13% lower revenue growth, according to Forrester Research.
- Disengagement from ignored ideas contributes to broader losses like reduced profitability.
Organizations with effective idea processing have a measurable edge in performance and culture. In a fast-paced market, structured innovation can be a game-changer. It becomes all the more important to consider a centralised system and processes when resources are limited and innovation and change need to be curated by the leadership.
A system that ensures that employees' ideas are curated, processed, assessed, implemented and followed up until it is self-sustainable is critical for continuous innovation. Without such a system, the organisation may be letting go of several opportunities.
Organisational systems and cultures are complex and this indicates that perfectly good ideas may not be dealt with in a systematic manner unless there is a deliberate effort and appropriate mechanisms. Ideas may be discarded or rejected before they are even fully considered in the absence of effective systems to process them.
When employees witness the execution of ideas because of a reliable idea management system, they open up and begin to share more of their thoughts and ideas.
· Gallup finds highly engaged teams (fostered by idea systems) achieve 23% higher profitability, 18% higher sales productivity, and 17% overall productivity boost.
· Structured systems align ideas to goals, making firms 57% more likely to hit business objectives and 50% more likely to finish projects on time.
· They boost morale, cut costs via process optimization, and speed up market entry for innovations. Crowdsourcing also builds inclusion, turning staff into innovators.
Part 2: The Action
I-Bacus Tech has created a simple, effective and easy to use app to harness ideas, process them effectively and follow up until they become sustainable. This is designed to be a platform that supports the bigger change management strategy of an organization.
I-Bacus Tech's app has been built to accept and categorise ideas based on the most essential parameters. It has a thoughtfully constructed volatility score for each idea, and it is automatically calculated based on the complexity and impacted parameters. This score helps leaders prioritise the implementation based on potential success rate and implementation time etc. This score brings in a sense of speed and nudges decision-makers in the right direction.
Once the idea is chosen for implementation, it is followed by clear assignment of responsibility, following up with next steps until closure. The app has been developed to provide helpful visual and numerical reports that provide leaders and managers with a bird's-eye view of the ideas landscape and view the progress in the implementation of the ideas.
The system assures its users of agility with a simple approach to innovation and change.
What if the next big idea is in an employee's notebook and ignored because of the lack of an idea management system?
Get started before the idea walks out of the office or is lost forever! Start with a Free limited time trial of the "I-Bacus Employee Engagement Platform".
Email: demo@ibacustechlabs.in
Contact Person: Mr. Satheesh Kumar (CTO), Call: +91 9003562715 / Email: demo@ibacustechlabs.in for a demo or walk-through of the platform and get going with the best ideas waiting to be harnessed in your organisation.