Inter-Organizational Idea Management - Turning Ideas into Innovation

Abstract

Innovation managers are faced with a dilemma: on one hand corporate culture should value ideas and encourage employees to constantly think about and contribute new solutions. In practice, on the other hand, there are often too many ideas, but too little execution. Creative minds do not always have the capabilities to taking ideas to the next level themselves. Not every idea suits the organization which came up with it. In principle, ideas have no value at all until being turned into an innovation. On the example of EIT ICT Labs this paper describes a proposal for an inter-organizational idea marketplace as a solution for not only managing ideas in a sense of filing them, but for finding owners for shaping these ideas and for turning them into reality.

Keywords: idea management, innovation networks, open innovation, brokering, marketplace, absorptive capacity