All organisations have the ability to be smarter than the sum of intelligence and capabilities. In fact, good ideas can come from all corners of your organisation. Encouraging a culture of collaborative innovation and free-flowing ideas will foster innovation.

Your organisation needs to communicate strategically and openly about innovation, building a common language that allows would-be innovators to propose new ideas and develop a strong strategic argument.

Keep the process as simple as possible to encourage and facilitate the collection of ideas.

A simple tool to collect basic information is enough; among them, a concise statement of the product concept, the technology to be utilised, the form of the product, and the customer needs that the product will address.

Additionally, it is good to engage diverse stakeholders early and often, to help judge and frame the strategic case for a new idea, including customers and colleagues from areas of expertise who are in a good position to provide value (e.g., manufacturing, R&D, sales & marketing, and others). The culture of honest conversation plays a fundamental role.

If the idea gains support, regular peer reviews should be scheduled, with the goal of killing bad projects as quickly as possible and accelerating those that show the most promise. To rejuvenate the innovation pipeline, agile organisations undergo a constant process of collectively and continuously reviewing and fine-tuning the best ideas and stopping the others.

Some examples of evaluation criteria are the dimension of the target market and the potential revenue, the company’s expertise in the specific knowledge area, the level of strategic relevance of the potential results (eg, if innovations are part of a complex product system or CoPS), the level of protection from competition through proprietary process expertise and patents.

The participation of senior leaders in the innovation process is essential. They periodically review the portfolio of project ideas that are bubbling up, to clear the way for promising new projects, determine which of them should get funded, decide who will be assigned to these initiatives, and get innovation teams the resources they need.

In addition, it is important to understand and transform the barriers that hinder innovation, reduce innovation process requirements, counteract risk-averse culture, and encourage idea generation by giving people time, money, recognition, and dedicated physical space for innovation.