Idea Management: Idea Generation Stage with a Qualitative Focus

Abstract

Faced with an increasingly changing business environment, being flexible and more innovative has become an obligation for organizations. To better innovate and remain competitive, organizations must use all their knowledge, proficiencies and abilities of people to consistently create new creative products and services. Our work is centered on the beginning of the innovation process, commonly referred to as "Fuzzy Front End" focusing on Idea generation for new product development. The current paper presents a qualitative approach for managing idea generation stage within an innovation management process in order to ensure an improved quality of the first draft of Idea generation stage outputs. This paper presents a theoretical construct, defined as a qualitative approach to manage the emergence of Idea that aims to support activities of the Front End of innovation. We first present the global context of this work, the LifeCycle and the core concepts adopted for the idea generation. Next, we explore and discuss based on a set of defined characteristics some of existing creativity techniques. Then, we provide an overview of the quality concept in order to guide our research on developing a qualitative approach to support the idea generation stage. Finally, we conclude with future research directions for implementing the developed approach.

Ethical Leadership and Employee Creative Behaviour: A Case Study of a State-Owned Enterprise in South Africa

“…Gabriel and Politis (2012) argue that ultimately, the individual is the source of any new idea however, it is the leader who creates an environment for the followers to behave creatively. As such, ethical leaders have the capabilities to influence followers to explore new ways of doing their work by exploiting opportunities (Lacerda, 2015) and generating concepts for purpose of improvement (Haiba et al, 2015).…”

Effectiveness of Modified Hybrid Brainstorming Learning Program in Increasing Innovative Work Behavior and Innovative Idea Performance among Nurses

“…Participants gained creative skills; divergent and convergent thinking, from practicing in groups of 6 individuals [15,26] with diverse characteristics [27,28], combined group interactions, released idea fixation by knowledge loading with related evidence-based practices [15,16,21], and providing free-time for incubation process before idea generation [18]. As in the hybrid brainstorming concept, the groupbased brainstorming method combined with different methods or conditions, allowing group members to share ideas without production blocking, social loafing, evaluation apprehension, and working with different team members characteristics under time restrictions could enhance innovative idea performance [15,20,44,55].…”

“…However, the most effective brainstorming practices consist of 6 participants [15]. Moreover, group-based brainstorming which consists of group members with diverse experiences and vary areas of expertise tends to generate significantly more novel ideas [27,28]. As seen, there are 2 general styles of group interactions for brainstorming sessions: a) face-to-face (verbal) interactions; and b) paper and pencil (non-verbal) interactions.…”

Digital Entrepreneurship Perspective of Smart Organization and Technological Innovation: A Conceptual Model

“…Research reveals that the rates of digitalization continue to grow in today's environment that characterized by uncertainty, market challenges, the workforce's continual demographics changes, and social, political, economic volatile changes in addition to the competition ferocity (Parviainen et al, 2017;Satalkina & Steiner, 2020). Thus, in this turbulent situation, innovation is the only choice for sustaining growth and competitiveness, organizations really need to become "smart" (i.e., internetworked, knowledge-driven, able to adapt, learning continually, creative, understand the surrounded environment, flexible in their ability to create home-grown innovative ideas and exploit both external and internal available opportunities (El Haiba, Elbassiti, & Ajhoun, 2017;Teece, Peterar, & Leih, 2016). Indeed, organizations have to innovate continuously in order to thrive (El Bassiti and Ajhoun, 2013).…”

“…The SO, as a novel organizational shape, is in fact the result of all transformations mentioned above. This notion actually emerged from the firms' and enterprises' urgent need to respond to the progressively changing business landscape in dynamic, innovative, and smarter manners (El Haiba et al, 2017).…”