New Ideation Software Management System - Kindling

It is not often we recommend ideation software platforms promoting innovation and collaboration as in the main most of the existing platforms are unwieldy and have proved pretty inept at doing just what they claim to do - facilitate better idea evaluation. However Kindling Idea Management looks like it might be an  addition worth exploring in the already crowded ideation software market place. Click here to have a look at their site.

So When Do You Stop The Ideas - WorkAwesome

So you’re about to launch. You’ve done a great job planning and executing this project. And you’re almost ready to unveil your baby to the world. And this is when people start coming up with new ideas and suggestions. Often it’s a major decision maker such as your boss who thinks a new feature or two is needed. Do you rework everything? How do you consider everyone’s feedback and respectfully decline the advice? That all depends on many factors. In the end, you need to decide what’s the gain. And some of that advice comes from someone you can’t ignore.

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Anybody Can Learn to Become A Better Idea Generator

Everybody can make himself better at creating ideas. People can increase their creativity by improving their knowledge about the topic ideas should be generated about, practising a range of idea-generation methods, making efforts to create a lot of ideas and having the right attitude, says Lassi Liikkanen, a researcher from Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT. Liikkanen has just finished his PhD on creating ideas in conceptual design. In his thesis, Liikkanen modelled the idea-generation process. For him creating ideas means that a person processes memorized information and combines it in new ways. According to Liikkanen, results improve if the person obtains more background information on the topic. The more a person knows about the topic and can learn from others, the more chances he has to make novel combinations of knowledge.

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The Big Idea: Capital Market Funds For Invention - Harvard Business Review

Here is a very interesting idea from Nathan Myhrvold, the former Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft. As the cofounder of Intellectual Ventures, he has been reviled as a patent troll - a renegade who buys up patents and uses them to hold up companies. Nothing could be further from the truth. In this worthwhile article from Harvard Business Review, he proposes the world needs a capital market for invention like the venture capital market for start-ups and the private equity market for revitalizing inefficient companies. The argument: Inventing—producing useful, patent-worthy ideas—is a dysfunctional, cash-starved activity that’s overly dependent on government largesse because it is not organized as a for-profit activity. A better approach:

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What Innovation Means For Small Businesses

Wall Street Journal have been looking at innovation and small business... The ability to innovate and smartly execute new ideas will make or break many businesses in the future, as we noted recently. But many small companies don’t know what that means – or how to create that magic spark. Jump Associates of San Mateo, Calif., consults Fortune 500 companies like Hewlett-Packard, Target and Procter & Gamble on how to bolster innovation in the workplace and identify new channels of growth. We spoke with Chief Executive Dev Patnaik about the role innovation should play in a small business, what it means exactly, and the common mistakes. Here are edited excerpts.

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