itssho

This is a totally valid opinion of innovation management and I share it mostly... So quick background I've been involved in 3 startups now with varying degrees of success (1 included an exit). In all of those cases we had our early days where 'ideas' pretty much drove the bus. We had an idea... we validated it (at least in the 1 case of exiting lol) and grew from there. Then something happens when there are 50 people in the office... people have ideas... ideas about the product, ideas about the sales, ideas about the fridge in the break room. Whatever. Point is, now the path forward isn't so clear and version 2 of the product is not as obvious as version 1 was. Processes that worked in the beginning are straining and the founders don't always know exactly why. Do they need to be ripped out and replaced or just incrementally changed. Now in the case of a startup it means the founder clears the schedule, sits down with people and figures shit out. In a large company (250+ people) that's not even possible. It would have been nice if as a founder I didn't have to clear the schedule and brute force this, would have been nice if I could have had a pipeline of ideas that helped team leads quickly approve incremental changes and founders understand new problems and make larger strategic decisions without turning to divination :P (which happens). Sort of like a CRM for ideas... this is how I think about innovation management. Innovation shouldn't a new management objective that demands you show what you 'innovated' on this quarter or your fired.

I see so much MIRO and my experience is it works in the moment, but then it can be difficult to organize after the fact or really hard to focus on what's important if you were not a part of the ideation that happened.

So here's a couple follow ups based on these great responses... I do a lot of the things I've read in everyones comments. I do tend to lean more digital so things like Notes, Notepad, Markdown editors really resonate with me. However, my challenge is, I end up with a labyrinth of notes that I have to search by trying to remember what I've written in them etc. Then I want to share some of those ideas... so let's say its 10% of them. That's where things get difficult. How do I send those out? Email? How do I keep track of what people thought of them and whether or not I should take action on them. At what point does an idea become a task? Which leads me to another question ... how many of these "ideas" that everyone is recording on paper, digitally etc are possible tasks?

I realize this is like a fireside chat at this point, but its quite interesting and hope its sparking (no pun intended) some interesting thoughts (I just couldn't say ideas) for you as it is for me.

I still email URLs to myself... I can't believe this hasn't been solved.