Tips for Organizing Ideas and Fostering Innovation

By Corinne Feight

In the spirit of our entrepreneurship day coming up in February during our Career Week, I wanted to address some simple ways to inspire innovation and organize your potential thoughts. Organization could be the reason an idea makes it. Many companies have places that hold all of these ideas, but many times these places are chaotic; therefore, making it difficult to find information inside if not impossible. A sense of organization not only keeps things straight, but also shows any employees that their ideas are not simply thrown into a black hole, never to come out again.

According to Nadia Goodman, a reporter for Entrepreneur Media, Inc., there are four ways to organize your ideas effectively and drive innovation.

•       Discuss ideas in a central location. Start by creating a central space where you collect and share ideas. Make sure you're using a dynamic tool, with built-in opportunities for collaboration and feedback.  
•       Label your lists of ideas. To keep ideas clearly organized, streamline them by topic. You might set up broad categories, such as "customer requested features," or specific ones tailored to a project or goal. Breaking ideas into smaller groups helps you process and select the ones that best suit your business. 
•       Make sure a leader owns each list. For each list of ideas, establish a point person who will take ownership—someone who is an integral part of the team that would act on those ideas. For example, ideas to improve your website's infrastructure need to be collected and owned by the team responsible for maintaining it. 
•       Treat your idea bank like an inbox. To prevent a backlog of ideas, address each one as quickly as possible. Dismiss the ideas that are definitely not viable, then move any that have potential into specific follow-up categories. Some may need immediate action while others may need more input before you can make a decision. As you make decisions, be sure to communicate them back to the organization. Knowing which ideas were chosen and why will make people more likely to share their thoughts in the future.

Keep these in mind over winter break and don’t forget to come to our many programs in February on this day!

Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/225133#