Idea and Innovation Blog

Leadership and ownership can come in many types and sizes; but whatever incarnation it happens to be in, no one can deny its value as a custodian of a mission and as the principal driver of deliverables; even if the end-goal is as small as one solitary idea.

That is why the concept of Individual Idea Championing has become so powerful to the innovation process; because it provides both the surrogacy and the motivation. Hereunder are three of the most important benefits:

1. Individual Idea Championing ensures that each idea has an owner responsible for its development, collaboration and progression – no matter what the eventual outcome may be. In fact, having Individual Idea Champions is more that the assurance of steps being followed - if properly engaged and recognized, these critical role players will bring the necessary resources to their part of the process to not only accelerate task execution and engage a greater pool of collaborators, their role insures an optimal level of idea development so that the next step of your process can hit the ground running
2. Individual Idea Championing also creates a tremendous distribution of labor; what with numerous and distributed nature tasks associated with each idea’s development, workflows and decision-making, it is increasingly difficult to manage multiple ideas centrally
3. Individual Idea Championing encourages the development owners to seek expertise on demand, rather than leave such important collaboration tasks to the “dumbness” of an automated routing system – after all, who can accurately predict what, when, who, why and how much of nay input such as data, knowledge or expertise an idea will need at any given touch-point of its journey towards a final decision?

Knowing the value that these process role players bring to the innovation process success equation begs a question:

Q. How many of these dynamos can a process have?

A. As many as you can imagine

This is the quintessential scenario of more being merrier - because as ideas begin to be implemented in greater numbers and corporate results confirm their value, idea championing takes-on a whole new momentum; which then feeds on itself. Now imagine that one can begin by having only Individual Idea Champions that are internal – and as your external communities become more adept at participating in your process, a select few could start championing external ideas for you; albeit with limited views, permissions and access to internal company information. You could literally have small platoons of Idea Champions tasking away to develop better ideas ever faster. All you had to provide is the leadership to create the environment.