Invent like Thomas Edison: A Structured Argument for Managing the Idea Process

8/9/2019 Invent like Thomas Edison: A Structured Argument for Managing the Idea Process

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This white paper sets point by exploring three major trends which underscore reasons whyimproved ideation is a requirement for future competitiveness. Further, this paper showshow ideation fits into the product pipeline and that it is not just limited to ideas for newproducts and services. Finally, this paper highlights research showing the common problemswith idea management, so that organizations can avoid them. This discussion is intended tomotivate smart managers and employees to improve their companys ideation processes.

IntroductionAs a full-time researcher and Ph.D. in Innovation, I have uncovered some horriblymismanaged parts of the product development process. Unfortunately, major activities likeidea generation and idea management are systemically mishandled across a majority of industries. This may be due to the complicated nature of todays development process,making us lose sight of these vital activities. Or perhaps it is due to the 20th centuryspredominate financial paradigm, pushing our focus toward the expensive back end of thedevelopment process, while ignoring the low cost front-end processes. Nonetheless, I willshow in this white paper that these activities need to be brought back into the limelight. Aswell, I will show that a well-run ideation process will be required for competitiveness today.

A Planview W hite PaperDr. Brian GlassmanPh.D. in Innovation M anagement

Invent Lik e Thomas Edison: A Structured Argum ent forManaging the Idea Process

A SH ORT STORY Thomas Edison, founder of General Electric, was the first true inventor of the R&D lab.So, I figured he was a worthy place to start my research on ideation. I dove intoreferences about his company and saw how he invented and marketed his products(Stross, 2007; Hardagon, 2000). In order to produce a steady stream of inventions hesystematically managed ideation. To do this, he hired a diverse set of people (fromengineers, to watchmakers, to repairmen), conducted idea campaigns, and zealouslymanaged idea generation activities where tasks like detailed competitor reviews,tinkering, prototyping, and rapid experimentation were required. To ensure ideas weremanaged properly he kept tidy records of new ideas and had individuals assigned toreviewing, screening, and categorizing ideas. Finally, he promoted rigorous discussionof ideas and to help this he placed his engineers in several small and cramped rooms

to assure their quick propagation.

After this review of Edisons methods, I marched forwards in time toward the currentdays practices in ideation. One would imagine that we have evolved much sinceEdisons humble beginnings, but the statistics tell a different tale. My survey sample of mid- to large-cap companies showed that the majority placed very little managementattention on their ideation process, resulting in the haphazard generation of ideas,poor ideas, and a poor ability to utilize ideas. Somewhere in the mix, Thomas Edisonslessons were lost, and if alive today he would have laughed at the poor state of theseprocesses. I could imagine him zestfully saying, If something is important to you,manage it! So, are you managing your ideation process?


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INVENT LIKE THOMAS EDISON: A STRUCTURED ARGUMENT FOR MANAGI NG THE IDEA PROCESS

CONTENTS

I. A Multi-Industry Wide Problem ............................................................................. 3

II. Trends Pointing to the Importance of Ideation ...................................................... 3

A. The Need for More and Better Ideas ................................................................ 31. The Pace of Competition ............................................................................ 4

2. Growth Targets ......................................................................................... 4

3. The Fight Against Commoditization ............................................................. 4

4. The Need for Disruptive Products ............................................................... 4

B. The Need to Convert Ideas at Higher Rates and More Efficiently ........................ 5Type I Errors: False Positives ......................................................................... 5

Type II Errors: False Negatives ...................................................................... 5

C. The Need to be Customer-Driven .................................................................... 5Customer-Driven Thinking as Applied to the Manufacturing Processes ............... 5

Customer-Driven Thinking Applies to All Industries .......................................... 6

III. Moving Towards a Set of Solutions ..................................................................... 6

IV. How Ideation Fits into the Development Process .................................................. 8

V. Common Problems with the Idea Management Process .......................................... 91. Capturing Ideas ........................................................................................ 9

2. Screening Ideas ...................................................................................... 10

3. Storing Ideas .......................................................................................... 10

4. Categorizing Ideas .................................................................................. 10

5. and 6. Diffusing and Routing Ideas ........................................................... 10

VI. A Balanced View of Idea Management ............................................................... 10

VII. Conclusions ................................................................................................... 11

VIII. Planview Enterprise for Product Development .................................................. 12

About the Author .................................................................................................. 13

References ........................................................................................................... 13

2009 Planview, Inc. Page 2 of 13


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I. A Multi-Industry Wide ProblemMy research on idea generation and idea management, in combination referred to as

ideation, uncovered a systemic error, that of the under-management of these importantactivities. Table 1 below shows a small sample from my 65-question survey, which wasanswered by 40 companies across 25 industries. Looking at this chart, one can see that

many of these vital activities are always managed by a paltry 15% of the companies; howabysmal! This is a staggering error; my research shows that companies that always manage these processes are much more satisfied with their ideations process outcomes,such as the quality of ideas, number of ideas, time to generate ideas, ideas fit withstrategy, their ability to capture ideas from employees or outside sources, and thedevelopment outcomes of ideas entering the pipeline. Interestingly, the activities of

capturing and screening of ideas were the most managed by companies in my sample;yet sadly they were still greatly underperformed, with only 25% of the companies always managing them. (Glassman, 2009) .

To what degree does your company: Never Rarely Sometimes Most of

the time Always

Dont Know or NA

Hold events to generate ideas? 18% 28% 33% 10% 10% 3%Actively manage these events? 15% 28% 18% 15% 20% 5%Actively manage idea generation activities? 10% 30% 30% 15% 13% 3%Actively manage the capturing of ideas from outside sources?

8% 23% 31% 13% 18% 8%

Actively manage the capturing of ideas from employees?

10% 13% 23% 26% 23% 6%

Table 1: Sample of statistics from Improving Idea Generation and Idea Managementin Order to Better Manage the Fuzzy Front End of Innovation

This appalling lack of management for these ideation activities may be due to: 1) the limitedbut growing literature on conducting and managing these activities, 2) the formerly poorquality of tools and software to manage these activities, or, what I think is most likely, 3)the lack of understanding about how essential ideation will be in the near future for thecompetitiveness of the company. The arguments presented herein will concentrate on thethird point by showing how important it is to improve and manage the ideation process. Thisshould motivate smart managers and employees alike to pursue improvements in theseoften underappreciated processes.

II . Trends Pointing to the I mportance of IdeationThe movement toward ideation as a means of gaining a competitive advantage is starting toform, and the first adopters of these practices are already demonstrating its payoffs whiletheir competitors will watch and struggle to catch up (Huston, Sakkab; 2006) . The needto manage ideation for the product development process is backed by three major trends,which are 1) the need for more ideas and better ideas, 2) the need to convert ideas intoproducts at higher rates and more efficiently, and 3) the need for companies to be customerdriven.

A. The Need for M ore and Better I deas Frequently, managers yell that they need more ideas inside their company, and moreimportantly, better ideas! But these voices repeatedly lack the rigorous arguments needed



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to motivate upper management into action; hence a more grounded argument is needed.The case for more and better ideas revolves around four major points: 1) the increasedpace of competition in many industries, 2) the need to meet or exceed growth targets, 3)the need to fight against commoditization, and 4) the need to develop more disruptiveproducts and services.

1. The Pace of CompetitionCompetition is a constant aspect of every industry, and in an effort to get ahead, manycompanies have resorted to fighting a development war. Like a price war, development warsare a constant acceleration of development efforts in order to come out with the nextproducts faster and faster (Clark, & Wheelwright; 1995) . This acceleration of development efforts will require more ideas for new products and services, more ideas forproduct enhancements, more ideas to increase product quality and reliability; basically allaround more ideas are needed to stoke the fire. New development practices, like productlifecycle management, agile, open innovation, rapid development, and so on, are furtheraccelerating the pace of development, and a companys only hope to stay competitive is toevolve with the rest. Presently, you may feel your company has an adequate number of

ideas, but this will change as the pace increases. The sad story of Zenith TVs, which wasreluctant to increase the pace of development, illustrates clearly that if youre not willing toplay the game, you will be left behind.

2. Growth TargetsFurther, as a company grows, so does the size of its growth targets. Clayton Christensondiscusses how a company with US$10 million in revenue may need to put on US$1-3 millionto meet growth needs; whereas, a company with US$5 billion may need an astoundingUS$250 - $400 million in new revenue (Christensen, 1997; Huston, Sakkab, 2006) . Itis fairly straight-forward as a company grows so must its development capacity butsomething interesting happens to ideas. New product ideas and opportunities which wereonce very attractive no longer are, because the possible revenues they would create wouldnot help in meeting growth needs. Consequently, as a company grows, its previous stock of ideas becomes inadequate. Unfortunately, these large revenue ideas are much harder tofind or create.

3. The Fight Against Com moditizationNext, there is a constant need to fight commoditization; like the resilient desktop and laptopcompanies which finally felt the crushing pain of commoditization. In 2007, leaders like Dellhad to redo their business models in order to deliver a commodity product. This fightagainst commoditization can only be countered by differentiation, which is achieved byproducing and developing differentiated incremental or disruptive product ideas; otherwise,one should prepare to play the commodity game (P orter, 1985) .

4. The Need for Disruptive P roductsFinally, to develop a disruptive product, one needs lots of ideas, many more ideas than areneeded for an incremental product or service. Experts have tentatively estimated thatdisruptive products or services require a 50 to 100 times the number of ideas than doincremental products, so if on average you need 50 decent ideas to create one incrementalproduct, you will need 5,000 to develop one disruptive product (Stevens & Burley; 1997) .



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B. The Need to Convert Ideas at Higher Rates and M ore Efficiently There is an additional trend where the owners of the development process are beingrequired to convert early-stage product and service concepts into a marketable product orservice at higher rates of success (Clark, & W heelw right; 1995) . Actually, top executivesare asking (and many times forcing) development departments to run more efficiently and

economically. The increased amount of competition, development wars, and fights againstcommoditization make this more difficult, yet at the same time they are the reasons for thisrequest. Upper executives are more cautious after the most recent global financialdownturn, and they want to make the most economical use of their people, time, andcapital. Finally, competitors are building more efficient development processes, and thosewho do not keep up and play the game can quickly fall behind.

Type I Errors: False PositivesA big part of this move towards efficiency requires making more of good developmentprojects, and killing off more poor projects which consume valuable resources and givemoderate or low returns. In an ideal world, you want to select only winning ideas to bemade into new products, but there is a high chance that a manager selects and develops apoor idea, while actually thinking it is an acceptable one. In statistics this is called a Type Ierror being a false positive, which I affectionately term fools gold. Stage-gate processesand other mechanisms are meant to catch these errors, but often enough they do not and amediocre product launches to market and fails to or barely makes back its investment cost.

Type II Errors: False NegativesOn the other hand, Type II errors, or false negatives, are good products ideas that werekilled off, or put on permanent hold. Think of these as worthless uncut diamonds theycan be big blows to morale, especially when they are released by a competitor. Forexample, GM completely developed the minivan concept, but decided not to launch, andinstead Chrysler seized a billion-dollar market opportunity first . Risk-adverse management

is often blamed for Type II errors, but they are also a result of a development process thatdeals poorly with change, inadequate incentives, outdated decision-making techniques andcriteria, and the failure to deal with uncertain information.

C. The Need to be Custom er-Driven Finally, the paradigm of being customer driven is taking a strong root in the practices of best-in-class companies and is being taught in business schools as a required managementpractice. The customer-driven paradigm is a shift in thinking about the customer. No longerare they thought of as the source of demand at the end of the value chain; they are nowthe crucial resource and a key player in all of the companys core processes. Being customerdriven has great strategic benefits and significantly aids innovation and productdevelopment, but it requires managing more ideas (Selden, MacMillan; 2005) .

Customer-Driven Thinking as Applied to Manufacturing ProcessesTruly being customer driven results in an adjustment of the companys core processes andthe ensuing changes offer great strategic benefits. Take the example of a previously insularmanufacturing process which is now graded on the customers evaluations of quality, notmanagements notion of quality. Customer returns, defect rates, and customer-assessedquality directly affect incentives and performance reviews of this manufacturing department.In dealing with this shift, the manufacturing department creates new customer-centricmechanisms to help mend issues and improve quality, such as detailed field assessments,



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customer quality groups, customer research teams, and root-cause squads. In addition,they now will work much more closely with the service and design departments to preventproblems before they occur. The improved manufacturing department is now much moresensitive to the customers assessment of quality, more responsive to changes, andbecomes forward-thinking anticipating future quality needs.

Customer-Driven Thinking Across Core ProcessesCustomer-driven thinking is not limited to the manufacturing process, it should also beapplied to pricing, marketing, advertising, service, supply chain, product development, andmany other core processes. This combined change and respective adjustment create greatstrategic benefits (Selden, MacMillan; 2005) . Firstly, it makes the company much moresensitive to the customers, their environments, and their current and future needs, resultingin a more agile enterprise. Secondly, because it increases customer satisfaction and loyalty,the companys market position becomes more resilient and less susceptible to market shareattacks. Finally, because the company is more tuned into the customer, it can make itscurrent products more attractive and realize more opportunities for new products.

In particular, the customer-driven innovation process is distinctly different and moreeffective than the old style of product development, and it has been proven to be so (Souder, Buisson, Garrett; 1997) . Customer-driven innovation uses things likeethnographic research to collect sticky information hard-to-gather information oncustomer environments, problems, espoused and unmentioned needs (Thomke, VonHippel; 2002) . It also uses the hundreds of eyes and ears of employees with customercontact, like those in Services, Sales, Repair, Delivery, and so on, to collect this information.With this, a company can detect almost indiscernible trends, needs, and uncover many newproduct opportunities. Further, the customer-driven development process uses many morepoints of customer input to improve the odds of a successful product launch and drivehigher product revenues.

New tools and methods are required to deal with this massive amount of customerinformation (Karkkainen et. all; 2001) . As well, the customer-facing employees are nowbeing turned into idea factories, and must have an easy method of submitting ideas. Incombination, this creates a great number of new and valuable ideas, and to successfullymake use of them, the idea management process must greatly increase its capacity andefficiency.

II I. Moving Tow ards a Set of SolutionsLuckily, each one of the mentioned trends has solutions, and most of them involveimprovements in ideation. The need for more and better ideas will be filled by effectiveidea generation and idea management processes. My research details the top ideageneration processes (see the References section of this paper to download it). Moreimportantly, training development managers in how to conduct these processes is going tobecome a standard best practice (Glassman, 2009) . Further, time cannot be wasted; theold days of waiting for ideas to fall into your lap must be supplanted by immediately findingor creating ideas via focused idea campaigns. Capturing more and better ideas will alsorequire tapping more external sources like prospective customers, suppliers, hobbyistgroups, universities, and so on Consequently, establishing relationships with new externalsources is going to be vital, and implementing effective methods of capturing ideas andproviding the supporting tools or software to do so will be the critical enablers.



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The need to convert ideas at higher rates and more efficiently will be aided by newand proven methods of managing the development process, including agile development,portfolio management, project management, product lifecycle management, rapid productdevelopment, and knowledge management systems. Additionally, more effectivedevelopment processes will be created by tying together, and strongly linking, previously

separated parts of the development process. Interestingly, new development software hasmade great strides in these areas.

Intriguingly, the costly Type I error, or failed project, which is often blamed on middle andupper management, can be reduced by gathering more ideas. Consider that for every batchof ideas gathered, there is some distributionof idea quality as shown above. Whendealing with a batch of, say 50 ideas, onewould pick the top 30 ideas to evaluate, andout of this try to select the top 10 ideas forpreliminary development. Selection is notan exact science, because there is a natural

error in estimating an ideas quality and itsprobability of future success. Now, if thebatch grows to 100 ideas, one wouldprobably still pick the top 30 ideas toevaluate because of time constraints.Hence, the chance of getting higher qualityideas increases and the risk of a Type Ierror decreases. This would be especiallyimportant to managers whose careers arebased on on-going success in picking goodprojects to develop. Further, by increasingthe quality of ideas going into thedevelopment pipeline, you have a higherchance of converting the products intomarket successes. The old adage, garbagein equals garbage out truly applies to thedevelopment process and starts withideation.

Lastly, the need to be customer driven will require executive managementcommitted to making core processessensitive to customer needs. This starts with making the incentive and performance reviewprocesses from the leaders on down sensitive to customer metrics. Choosing the rightmetrics for each department or process is vital. Once that is completed, the departmentswill feel the pressure of customer demands, and should implement mechanisms to betterunderstand and deal with customer needs. In conjunction with this, a stream of informationand ideas will trickle, then pour in from the different parts of the business: Sales, CustomerService, Repair, Delivery, and so on. To deal with this great influx, and capture its value,knowledge management tools and idea management systems will need to be put in place.

Figure 1: How idea quality is affected by the numberof ideas gathered



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IV. How Ideation Fits into the Development ProcessWith all of this talk about how important ideation will be, it would be helpful to quicklyreview how ideation (being idea generation and idea management) fits into the productpipeline. Typically, the product pipeline is broken up into the front end of innovation,development, commercialization, and the market launch processes. Certainly, some

companies combined processes; nonetheless, on average the pipeline resembles the oneshown in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2: Where ideas are needed in the pipeline

The typical view of ideation is that of a front-end activity, where ideas for new products andservices are created or captured and then enter into the pipeline. This is correct, but whatmost people do not consider is that ideation is actually needed throughout the whole

pipeline (Hardagon, & Sutton; 2000). For example, development teams often exploremultiple design aspects of a product, and most often run into technical problems. To dealwith this, team leaders often run problem-solving sessions which often involvebrainstorming and problem-solving activities. From this, the team leader gathers a smallbatch of solutions (ideas), and often settles on a less than optimal design because of thelimited number of solutions. However, if he quickly ran an idea campaign tapping the largerbrain of the company, he would have a much better chance of getting an optimal solution.This type of situation exists not only in development, but also in the commercialization, andmarket launch processes.

Nevertheless, ideations heart is in the front end of innovation, and must be elaborated on.Figure 3 represents a simplistic yet accurate view of this process, based on my research onthe front end of innovation (Glassman, 2009). From this figure, one should note that theidea management process deals with ideas from the idea generation process, but alsocaptures ideas floating around the company or ideas submitted by outside sources likecustomers or suppliers. The ideas then move through the idea management process.Promising ideas are put into preliminary development, where they are further developed,researched, and have business cases wrapped around them. Finally, the best ideas, beingp r e l i m i n a r y p r o d u c t c o n c e p t s , are presented to the gatekeepers of the developmentprocess for acceptance.



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Figure 3. A simplified view of the front end of innovation

This simplistic view of this process is illuminating, yet it does not highlight where things cango wrong. The following section will look at the common problems with the ideamanagement process.

V. Common P roblems w ith the Idea Managem ent ProcessEvery companys problems are different and must be assessed individually, yet during thecourse of my research I have uncovered a list of common problems with ideation whichshould be avoided or fixed. Again, ideation is composed of two very different processesbeing: idea generation and idea management. Idea generation deals with finding or creatingideas and opportunities and is highly customized to the companys current strategic needs;while idea management is highly logistical (like the post office) and is always running, readyto capture ideas (like packages) and send them to the right people. For reasons of brevity, Ican only elaborate on problems with idea management; as this is more logistical in nature,these problems are much easier to fix.

The idea management process is broken up into six major activities: 1) capturing, 2)screening, 3) storing, 4) categorizing, 5) diffusing, and 6) routing ideas, and there arecommon problems which each.

1. Capturing IdeasFor capturing ideas, companies often erroneously limit themselves to employees and currentcustomers, when they should actually be tapping many sources like prospective customers,

lead customers, suppliers, hobbyist groups, universities, national labs, inventor groups,research firms, friendly competitors, and so on... This error is usually due to inexperience incapturing ideas from outside sources, legal concerns, or due to an inadequate system forcapturing ideas.

Another major problem is the lack of active management over the capturing of ideas, asshown in Table 1. My research has shown that active management greatly increases acompanys satisfaction and effectiveness in capturing ideas from employees and outsidesources (Glassman, 2009, pg. 265). Passive methods like suggestion boxes or emailrequests for ideas are often the most ineffective means of gathering ideas. In order to



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capture ideas as they occur, flexible and engaging methods like idea management software,open door policies, idea fairs, idea contests, and designated idea coordinators are needed.

2. Screening IdeasMy research also observed idea screening being applied haphazardly or randomly bymanagers, even inside the same company. This is a constant source of frustration foremployees hoping to submit helpful ideas, and can even dissuade them from futuresubmissions. For screening to be effective, uniform criteria must be applied to all ideas, andbe applied fairly. This minimizes personal bias or obsolete criteria from influencing whatideas are kept and which are discarded. This can be avoided by training, audits, or throughstructured screening processes like those present in idea management software.

3. Storing IdeasAs for storage, I have seen small number of ideas effectively kept in spreadsheets or inMicrosoft Word documents. However, with more ideas, emailing an idea document aroundor updating it manually quickly becomes tedious and eventually fails to be practical.Consequently, a considerable amount of ideas requires robust storage systems like those

present in top-grade idea management software; antiquated or repurposed databases oftendo not work.

4. Categorizing IdeasThe ability to categorize and sort ideas is vital for managers seeking a specific type of idea,like a disruptive product idea, amongst many hundreds in the idea bank. Further, spottingand filling gaps in the idea bank can only be done with formal categorization and sortingmethods. Here, filing cabinets of ideas are often ineffective, and relegated to collecting dust.Spreadsheets and documents packed with ideas are often just as frustrating; here again theviable solution for a large numbers of ideas is idea management software or purpose-builtdatabases.

5. and 6. Diffusing and Rou ting IdeasThe most important and, regrettably, often the most undermanaged, activities are thediffusing and routing of ideas. Diffusing ideas is the necessary last step in the chain, wheredevelopment managers and eager employees learn about these new ideas. These ideas thenhave the option to be turned into projects for new products or services; where if they arenot discussed or diffused this option never materializes. A common error in diffusion isallowing ideas to sit stagnant and unviewed in Word documents or in antiquated ideadatabases. The answer here is to force ideas out via multiple mechanisms, and ideamanagement software is only part of the solution. To be truly effective, one mustsupplement highly searchable and user-friendly idea databases or software with forceddiffusion methods like ideas meetings, weekly emails, lively discussions, idea bulletinboards, idea fairs, and others. Routing relevant ideas to the appropriate employees is alsovital, and an idea coordinator should be appointed to email new and significant ideas out topertinent employees.

VI. A Balanced View of Idea Managem entWith any new management activity, there are costs associated with implementing it, and inorder to present a balanced argument for idea management one must also understand itscosts as well as its benefits. For idea management, the costs revolve around its 1)assessment, 2) implementation, and 3) ongoing use.



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For companies with existing idea management systems, a qualified assessment shouldquickly show if the current system can be made adequate, or if it needs to be replaced. Thiscan be done internally by an innovation expert, or, if one is not available, an expert can behired or often provided for free by an idea management software vendor.

Next, the implementation of the idea management system will cost the company time andmoney. The time requirements will consist of training employees to use the new system,and formatting the system to meet the companys specific needs. Often, user-friendly ideamanagement software can be quickly learned by employees and requires minimal training.In some case, behaviors of employees will need to be changed (like making employees wantto talk about new ideas) and this behavior adoption will also take time. Now, as can beexpected, the price of a premium idea management system can be quite a bit higher thanthat of lower-end ones, but often this is justified through their robustness, user-friendlydesign, and dedicated support.

Finally, there is an ongoing diversion of managements time toward supervising the ideamanagement system. But as management becomes more knowledgeable and proficient in

controlling this process, the time required to do so becomes minimal. Interestingly, thestructure of the idea management system also determines how much time is required tomanage it, with hand-run systems often requiring a lot more time than software-basedsystems.

VII . Conclusi onsThankfully, after so many years, some of the sources of Thomas Edisons inventive geniusare being remembered and put back into practice. However, we still have a long way to gobefore companies are proficient at ideation. So one must remember that the ideationprocess is important and must be actively managed in order to create high quality results.Also, there are three major trends pushing companies to improve their ideation processes,these being: the need for more and better ideas, the need to convert ideas at higher ratesand more efficiently, and the need to be customer driven. Next, ideation is broken up intoidea generation and idea management, and there are common problems with ideamanagement that can be avoided with smart management of this process. Finally, usingidea management software for large numbers of ideas will greatly help in the logistics andexecution of this process. Hopefully, this white paper was illuminating and moreovermotivates you to improve your companys ideation process; in this way we can all inventlike Thomas Edison.



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VIII . Planview Enterprise for Product DevelopmentPlanview Enterprise , the portfolio management solution from Planview , featurescapabilities that help product organizations automate the ideation process, optimize productand roadmap planning, accelerate time to market, and provide transparency into the truecost of product development.

Planview Enterprise Ideation Management provides enterprises with an easy-to-use yetrobust method for creating and maintaining dynamic customer communities that generateand evaluate product ideas, providing a true view of customer needs and wants.

Integrated with the industry-leading Planview Enterprise portfolio management platform,and powered by an exclusive partnership with Brightidea , this unique offering helpsproduct organizations shorten the time to delivery of winning ideas within the optimalproduct and feature mix by ensuring efficient, consistent execution through sound portfolioanalysis, capacity planning, and project and resource management.

Planview Enterprise is certified Stage-Gate

Ready, an endorsement by Stage-Gate, Inc.,that this solution meets the requirements to help drive innovation while minimizing risk inproduct development efforts, and can be leveraged to successfully implement Stage-Gatebest practice processes such as Idea Management, Idea-to-Launch, and PortfolioManagement.

Learn more at www.planview.com/proddev .

2009 Planview, Inc. All rights reserved.

http://www.planview.com/proddevhttp://www.planview.com/proddev


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About the AuthorBrian Glassman, Ph.D., graduated from the College of Technology at Purdue Universityspecializing in Innovation Management and Technology Commercialization. He received hisB.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering and a second M.S. in EngineeringManagement from Duke University. His research, consulting, and scholarly interestscontinue to explore the many facets of Innovation Management and TechnologyCommercialization; and he is a passionately-driven entrepreneur. Brian is very open toquestions and can be reached at [email protected] .

ReferencesGlassman, Brian. (2009) Improving Idea Generation and Idea Management In Order to

Better Manage the Fuzzy Front End of Innovation, Ph.D. Dissertation, PurdueUniversity, West Lafayette Indiana http://techrd.com/blog/diss

Christensen, Clayton. (1997) The Innovators Dilemma, New York, New York, CollinsBusiness Essentials

Clark, K., & Wheelwright, S. (1995) The Product Development Challenge: CompetingThrough Speed, Quality, and Creativity, Harvard Business School Press, CambridgeMassachusetts

Hardagon, A. and Sutton, R.I . (2000) Building and innovation factory. Harvard BusinessReview, 78 May-June 157-166

Huston, L. & Sakkab, N. (2006) Connect and Develop: Inside Procter & Gamble's NewModel for Innovation, Harvard Business Review, March

Karkkainen H., Piippo P., Tuominen M. (2001) Ten tools for customer-driven productdevelopment in industrial companies International Journal of Production Economics,69 (2), pp. 161-176

Porter, Michael. (1985) Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining SuperiorPerformance. New York: Free Press

Randall E. Stross. (2007) The Wizard of Menlo Park: Thomas Alva Edison invented themodern world , Crown Publishing Group, New York City, New York

Ref 1 Anonymous. (2009) Type 1 and type 2 errors,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive#Type_I_error

Selden, L., & M acMillian, I. (2005) Manage Customer-Centric Innovation Systematically,Harvard Business Review, April 2006 pg 108-116

Souder, Wm., Buisson, D., Garrett, T. (1997) Success Through Customer Driven New

Product Development, Journal of Product Innovation Management, 14:459-471Stevens, G. A., & Burley, J. (1997). 3,000 raw ideas = 1 commercial success! Research

Technology Management, 40(3), 16-27.

Thomk e, S., & Von Hippel, E. (2002) Customer as Innovators A new way to CreateValue, Harvard Business Review, April 2002 pg 74-81
mailto:[email protected]://techrd.com/blog/disshttp://techrd.com/blog/disshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive#Type_I_errorhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive#Type_I_errorhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive#Type_I_errorhttp://techrd.com/blog/dissmailto:[email protected]

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Invent like Thomas Edison: A Structured Argument for Managing the Idea Process