Too many ideas? Many organizational leaders find this to be just as frustrating as not having enough. The challenge lies in capturing, organizing, and testing ideas to bring new innovations to market fast enough to realise value. 

From Creative Chaos to Structured Implementation 

The chaotic process of creativity is difficult to predict, yet is often the essential fuel for new idea generators. While organizations have an ability to gather ideas, many still struggle with the remaining phases of the innovation process. How do you mobilize ideas resting in the middle manager’s inbox or scribbled on Post-it notes from your latest workshop? What’s the smartest path for ideas to unlock their real value whether that be revenue, cost savings or other value? 

The sheer volume of ideas in most organizations makes it difficult to grasp how to manage them all. There are numerous manual clustering techniques to apply in order to group ideas, for e.g. based on: 

• Category (product, process, service, organization, management systems, production or business model) 
• Situation (traveling, dining or sleeping) 
• Need (safety, productivity, entertainment or creativity etc) 
• Sentiment (positive or negative) 

According to Innovation 360’s experiments, working with teams across the globe, manual techniques work for up to approx 50 ideas. Trying to organize a larger number of ideas often leaves people feeling rather confused and frustrated. See Miller’s Law: the number of objects our brain can hold in working memory is seven ± two, which makes 50 ideas sound quite impressive. 

Using Technology to Push the Boundaries of Creativity 

The clustering process is a crucial step in finding interesting idea combinations, and it is often in this step that we discover the seeds for what has the potential to become radical innovations (those that bring significant change). Because of the frustration and confusion, people tend to skip this part of the process. Why not use technology to increase our chances to discover these combinations? 

In order to support teams in the clustering process, Innovation360 developed an automatic Cognitive Clustering function in the ideation360 SaaS enterprise solution.

A few benefits with automatic clustering as a complement to manual clustering are that it enables you to: 

• Organize a large volume of ideas – Automatic clustering of a large volume of ideas based on keywords identified with Microsoft Azure’s Cognitive AI Module. 

• Identify unexpected combination of ideas – Identify unknown patterns and clusters in a large dataset that would have not been identified otherwise, due to AI capabilities. 
• Understand the underlying sentiment – The sentiment can be identified using cognitive AI by identifying whether the tone of the keyword is positive or negative. This, in turn can help organizations learn about their innovation culture and how to design idea challenges. 
• Remove language barriers – The cognitive AI identifies keywords in different languages and translates them to English for analysis, allowing Ideators to share ideas in their native language with a central analysis done in English. 

Organizations who capture creativity and leverage it by applying new technology will race past the ‘post-it’ generation organizations at lightning speed.