Metodos generacion ideas

7 Strategies for Generating Ideas
Posted on October 31, 2011 by Robert B Tucker
 
How do organizations come up with new ideas? And how do they use those ideas to create successful new products, services, businesses, and solutions?
To answer these questions, a team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York spent time observing radical innovation projects such as IBM’ssilicon-germanium devices, GE’s digital X-ray, GM’s hybrid vehicles, and DuPont’s biodegradable plastics. Their key finding? Most of the ideas behind these projects came from “happy accidents” rather than some ongoing process to generate ideas.
In more than a few cases, individuals or small groups were simply “freelancing,” working on ideas on their own initiative rather than being directed bysome “new venture” board or other idea management system.
“Almost without exception, these idea-generation methods have been applied sporadically, rather than systematically, continuously, and strategically,” the Rensselaer researchers concluded. “In no case [we know of] has an ongoing process been set up that regularly requests such ideas. What we observed were one-time acts, or new systems put inplace whose staying power remains unproven.”
It is little wonder that so many good ideas never even come to the attention of management. Or that so many die short of development–and miles from commercial success. In most companies today, the “practice” of innovation can be likened to the mating of pandas: infrequent, clumsy, and often ineffective. Its practice is largely unchanged from 20 yearsago. While the world has changed drastically and organizations pride themselves for having a process for everything, the process of innovation remains ad hoc, unsystematic, piecemeal, seat of the pants, and, as the Rensselaer researchers confirmed, heavily dependent on luck.
Creative, game-changing ideas will always have an element of serendipity to them, and will never be producible on demand.But today’s present economic climate of stalled growth and fewer ideas (growth in the number of patent requests have stagnated in recent years) has caused a small but growing group of organizations to rethink how ideas happen and to examine what they can do to implement better innovation processes.
Fortifying the Idea Factory
Three-fourths of companies are consistently disappointed in theirinnovation results, according to global surveys of executives. But a minority of organizations–the innovation vanguard–recognize the need for change if their results are to improve. Put simply, if good ideas don’t get hatched, they won’t get launched. The “vanguard organizations,” 23 of which we studied for a recently released book, create stronger idea factories by cultivating the conditions whereby“happy accidents” are more likely to occur. The vanguards are, in essence, reinventing inventiveness. They are paying much more attention to the oft-called “fuzzy front end” of innovation where possibilities first come to light. And they are managing these notions in vastly different ways so that large quantities of ideas eventually fill the pipeline and emerge as tangible results.
In reviewing theunconventional methods of these vanguard organizations, we found that, while innovation and breakthroughs can never be commanded from the top, leaders can do much to increase throughput of significant ideas. And indeed they must. We see these leading-edge organizations using seven key strategies for fortifying the idea factory:
1. Invite everyone in the quest for new ideas.
2. Involvecustomers in the process of generating ideas.
3. Involve customers in new ways.
4. Focus on the needs that customers don’t express.
5. Seek ideas from new customer groups.
6. Involve suppliers in product innovation.
7. Benchmark idea-creation methods.
Clearly the customer plays an important role in these strategies for strengthening the organizational idea factory. It only...