Collect

You've identified the purpose and an initiator for your mission. Now, the most critical step is defining how you will collect ideas.

Asking for ideas in the best way and defining how detailed you want them to be has a big impact on the rest of the Flywheel.

Define an Idea Template

An idea template is like an empty skeleton that people fill with their ideas. It inspires and provides context when needed. Ideanote offers plenty of custom fields to choose from. Adding helpful contextual clues like placeholder texts means you're basically side-coaching people, helping them submit ideas in a format that has a better chance of being chosen as a winner.

From your perspective, depending on how broad your audience and question are, you might want to add qualifiers like a checkmark field asking, "Which area is this idea impacting?". Need some legal consent? Add a checkmark field. Need estimates? Add a slider field. Need to know what type of idea it is? Add a radio button field.

But remember: while people love submitting ideas, they do not like wasting time.

Only ask the questions you need to ask. The best practice is about four, max. six questions.

Define a How-Might-We Question

In Ideanote, you can launch goal-driven idea collections that center around a challenging question to inspire people to come up with ideas. We recommend posing focused, open-ended questions with the How Might We (HMW) method.

How Might We questions help people think differently and develop new, valuable ideas? The better the question, the better the ideas. Posing too narrow a question might mean you're already pre-defining the solution.

For example, "How might we deliver food via drones?" Posing too broad a question might leave your people wondering what exactly you are looking for. "How might we earn more money?" It's all about striking a balance.

A good idea collection question provides people with focus yet leaves enough room to explore even the boldest ideas. Ask a question that inspires, instills purpose, and is easy to understand.

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