Why Reporting is the Answer to your Prayers

What’s on everybody’s mind, hard to define and even harder to quantify? Innovation of course. At Ideanote we’ve just released our reporting feature and we’re super excited! Read below why you should be equally excited.

Innovation is not only hugely important, it’s also irritatingly fuzzy and really hard to measure. Because how do you measure good innovation? Where does it come from? Who are the best innovators in your company?

If only there was a way to get an answer to all these business-critical questions…

Reporting helps you answer questions such as:

Who are undercover disruptors?

What if you could identify and single out the people that are simply crushing the innovation game for you?

Finding and identifying innovation superheroes is not always as straightforward as we would like it to be.

In larger teams and organizations, it can be hard to personally know every team member and thus also who exactly are your organization’s best innovators.

Secondly, not all people are comfortable speaking up during your brainstorming sessions. That, however, does not mean that they don’t have any stellar ideas. A digital platform welcomes more people to the table than you team-meeting usual suspects. Getting data points on who these undercover disruptors are, helps you cultivate their talent and boost your innovation further.

Lastly, if Glen comes up with 21 ideas but only 2 are implemented with little effect and Carol comes up with 3 ideas all of which are implemented with great impact, who is the better innovator? See what I’m getting at here? One thing is coming up with many ideas, another thing is coming up with ideas that are feasible and implemented.

Let data help you find those people that have a talent for innovation and start cultivating it (did anybody say talent management?!).

What ideas are implemented?

Are you implementing the kind of ideas you are hoping for? Implementing 35 new ideas is great. But if you were looking for new product ideas and exclusively implementing process improvement ideas, you need to start looking into what causes this.

Are you asking the right questions, selecting the right ideas and inviting the right people to participate?

Only looking at the number of ideas robs you of the possibility to go in and make the necessary corrections to fulfill your innovation goals. By adding an extra layer of insights, you can identify areas for improvement and faster fix the issues that are holding you back.

Why are ideas not implemented?

What if you could use reporting data to identify flaws in your innovation focus?

Not all ideas are going to be implemented, and that’s actually pretty nice. Here we collected a couple of ideas that would have been better off staying an idea.

Yet, have you ever looked into why you reject ideas? Doing a bit of digging into the reasons for rejections could help you identify reasons for why your innovation might not be going as smoothly.

Are the ideas too ambitious or are the people calling the shots not ambitious enough? Are the different departments suffering from the Not-Invented-Here Syndrome? Is there an inherently negative attitude towards change?

How can you do even better?

Oftentimes, a team or two are just killing it! They are not only coming up with the most ideas, they also get more ideas implemented faster. All in all, they are just crushing the innovation game. Could also be that a regional office is way more active than you other offices around the world.

When you have these insights at your fingertips, you can start looking into why this is. Are there certain things managers do to encourage this behavior? Do they have certain practices and processes set in place surrounding the ideas in Ideanote?

This allows you to take the good stuff to replicate and adapt around your other teams and offices. Helping you bring all your teams to innovation glory, learning from each other.

Final thoughts

At the end of the day, data is only data it’s all about what question you ask the data. Hopefully, this post led you onto what you can start asking your data when trying to quantify your innovation.

The reporting feature is included in limited form on the business plan and fully fledged on the enterprise plan. Click here to get your first 30 days for free.