Clarity on PLM

I had the chance to talk with … SAP and their customer Colgate in June, and learned that they have been hard at work improving the way manufacturers innovate. I was attending an SAP customer event on PLM to get updated on the progress of SAP’s PLM efforts. SAP continued to showcase their new PLM interfaces (now including Recipe Management for the process industries). But the thing that caught my attention most was a presentation on a newly co-developed solution for product innovation codenamed “Edison.” While this isn’t a formal SAP product as of yet, it shows some real promise on how companies can use social computing to drive innovation.

Note: Hopefully this wasn’t the only thing I learned in June, but things have certainly busy and I am behind in sharing!

What they are Doing

The solution, presented jointly by SAP and Colgate, is labeled as an “idea management” solution. To me that description falls a bit short of what they have developed. The solution handles a broad range of the innovation process, including:

• Idea Solicitation – to help target innovation as opposed to an all purpose suggestion box
• Idea Submission – to capture ideas from participants, including any supporting media they choose to submit
• Review and Processing – to help companies find the ideas they want to focus on, including search, filtering, sorting, tagging, and commenting
• Evaluation – allowing companies to score innovation and promote the good ones
• Execution – although this was a little less clear to me, this is the idea that the promoted ideas would flow into SAP’s PPM solution to turn into product development projects

The first thing that stood out to me as evidence that this was based on practical experience was that they didn’t assume that getting more ideas was better. I run into vendors all the time who like to talk about helping their manufacturing customers get more ideas. All of my research and interviews end up with the same conclusion from manufacturers: “I don’t need more ideas, I need help sorting through all of the junk to find the good ones!” Manufacturers want better ideas, and they want a way to make sense of the volumes of input they get. Kudos to Colgate and SAP for getting this right, which I have to imagine came from Colgate’s real-world experience in innovation.

Another thing I was impressed with was the objectives of the project. They set out to build something “simple, usable, flexible, and extendable.” As well thought out as the solution seems, it doesn’t appear that they over-designed it. The solution does not look or feel like SAP, but instead is a light, web-based experience. While this might not be appropriate for the highly transactional world of traditional SAP solutions, it is ideal for this application where broad use by untrained participants is a key to success. After all, you don’t want all of your innovation coming from a few trained insiders!

One final point that Colgate made which I think is important to consider, is that the solution is not only valuable in the front end of innovation but throughout the new product development process. In fact, early use of the tool at Colgate has helped solve supply chain issues like cost reduction.

Implications for Manufacturers

The use of social computing techniques to drive innovation is beginning to take shape. SAP is clearly interested in providing this capability, as are standalone innovation management solutions such as Brightidea, Imaginatik, Ideajam, and others.  Some upcoming research I will publish soon with Kalypso shows that many manufacturers are getting started in the use of social media in innovation, and those that did are going to increase usage next year. Times are changing, and it will be interesting to see who can best take advantage of this new opportunity.

So that is what I heard from SAP and Colgate, I hope you found it interesting. Who knew? I didn’t, if you did let us know about it. Who else should I be paying attention to in this space?

A quick peek into some research on … closing the loop on product innovation through an integrated ERP-PLM strategy. This paper furthers past research on The Complementary Roles of ERP and PLM and earlier research on how integration between these two enterprise systems is maturing in the Evolving Roles of ERP and PLM. The topic of how manufacturers can best leverage ERP and PLM systems is one that I continue to get questions on, and I hope that this paper, Issue in Focus: The Integrated ERP-PLM Strategy, helps further the conversation. I should also point to a good discussion on Oleg’s PLM Twine generated by my last research on ERP and PLM, there are some good comments made there.

The Research Findings

At the risk of being redundant, the paper reconfirms the primary roles of ERP and PLM:

• PLM – PLM focuses on product innovation, and is designed to help manufacturers design, develop, and launch profitable products.
• ERP - ERP’s role is executing the business of manufacturing, supporting the business of planning and managing the execution cycle.

To many these may seem to be an obvious statements, but I still hear confusion in the manufacturing community. This is particularly true as ERP companies introduce PLM solutions. That is why I clearly “Busted“ the myth that PLM is a module of ERP in my Mythbusting ERP-PLM Integration post.

So what is new in this report? A focus on closed loop integration. Here are the key points that I hope people will take away from the research:

• Innovation is not limited to Engineering – Manufacturing, Service, and other departments innovate too. They change processes and make minor product changes for service or manufacturability to keep things working smoothly. These smaller, day-to-day innovations are frequently not communicated back to Engineering, and are therefore implemented inconsistently and not designed into the next generation of products. I recognize that this is not as prevalent in all industries (due to regulation), but the result is a disconnect between what was designed and what is built and in the field.
• Companies are not Confident Enough to Introduce Changes Rapidly – Many companies do not have a change management process that allows them to rapidly improve their product. Engineering changes are held up into batches or delayed because manufacturers lack the ability to clearly communicate changes to Manufacturing and the supply chain without disruption. The result here is delayed time to market for cost reduction, quality improvements, and minor product enhancements. Or, companies push forward anyway and end up with scrap, rework, and unhappy customers.

A well integrated manufacturing systems environment can help companies overcome these two issues. Closing the loop (through integration) allows companies to rapidly introduce continuous improvements, and keep designs in sync across departments and the product lifecycle.  

Implications for Manufacturers
For manufacturers, integrating ERP and PLM is becoming more commonplace. This is good news. Of course, not everybody has PLM in place yet, although most have an ERP (or more than one in many cases, but that is a different story). Unfortunately, I continue to see companies make ERP and PLM choices tactically instead of strategically. I discussed one example of this in Choosing an ERP to fit PLM. This leads to two other points that I hope manufacturers will take away from this research:

• ERP and PLM strategies are too important to be technology-led decisions, and should be addressed in a process-centric approach.
• Recognizing that both ERP and PLM are critical to product profitability, manufacturers must be uncompromising on the needs of these two systems.

As I say in the final recommendations, “Choose the right ERP and PLM solutions, making sure they meet your company, industry, and manufacturing model requirements.” Get the right ERP and PLM systems first. Focus first on getting software that meets the innovation and execution needs of your business. It is better if those solutions are “integration-capable” through current technologies (SOA, XML, API, etc.). Ideally, the solutions come pre-integrated by the vendors. But integration has to be a secondary set of requirements behind functional capability.

So that was a quick peek into some recent research on integrating ERP and PLM to close the loop on product innovation, I hope you found it interesting. Does the research reflect your experiences? Do you see it differently? Let us know what it looks like from your perspective.

Please feel free to review more free research and white papers about PLM and other enterprise software for manufacturers from Tech-Clarity.

A quick peek into some research (and some “mythbusting”) on a post by Christopher Null on Yahoo News titled “Facebook and business don’t necessarily mix.” Great, catchy headline. But does it really reflect the underlying research from MIT? I don’t think so. I will also share some comments posted on the PDMA blog from a study by Kalypso that don’t sync up with the commentary. And, I will provide an opportunity for you to speak your mind by participating in a current research study on social media and product innovation.

Commentary and Reactions

I don’t know the author of the post, but when I read it something didn’t sit right with me. For the most part, maybe it was that the title of the post didn’t match the underlying premise. To be fair, I know that some editorial gets “help” with their titles to grab attention (which this one certainly did, at least to me). But here are my thoughts (and feel free to “bust” them yourself, I realize I don’t own all the right answers).

Facebook and Business Don’t Necessarily Mix (Busted) – OK, I know I am picking on the title. But let’s own up to two realities:

1. You don’t have a choice. People on social networks are going to talk about your products. Whether you initiate the conversations or someone else does (customers or competitors), it is going to happen. As the post in PDMA ”Do you use social media in innovation?” points out, Social media on your terms is a much better idea than letting others take control of it for you. You MUST get ahead of this.

2. This isn’t what the MIT research says. The post Mr. Null references, “Pitch may fail on Facebook – Study: Social media don’t always create good buzz“, is much more aptly titled. What is says is that buzz can be positive or negative, and that it can actually hurt sales. According to the Boston Herald blog, the research (which I haven’t read, and is not published yet as far as I know) quotes the author as saying that “found that online buzz only helps when new products are at least half as good as consumers expected.” Now that is interesting! The author, P.J. Lamberson, an MIT Sloan School of Management visiting assistant professor, is said to use math to study large networks.

“Conventional Wisdom” (Plausible) – Mr. Null starts his article with “conventional wisdom now holds that if you want to have a successful product launch, you need to exploit Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace to get the word out about your product.” Is this really conventional wisdom? Are most companies using social media today? My experience says no, but I could be wrong. I will admit, my focus is more on social computing for product innovation, product development, and engineering (PLM) and not product launch. But my experience says that companies are experimenting with the use of social media, but it is far from standard operating procedure. The only evidence I have is from some preliminary results from the study being run by Kalypso (Disclosure: I am helping them run the study) that indicates that the use of social networking and social computing in product launches is still not fully developed. In fact, only about 1/2 of companies are using social media for product launch. Further, companies that are using social media are only using it on a small percentage of their initiatives. In other words, we are very early in the use of social media, and it is far from conventional wisdom. On the other hand, the preliminary results show that about 90% of companies that are using social media for innovation are planning to increase usage next year, with none indicating they were reducing it.  Why is this Plausible and not Busted? The research is not done – please participate in the survey and I will share results back with you via the blog.

Bottom Line (Busted) – After being generous with the last mark, I was fully planning to Confirm the post’s bottom line. Then I read it again to copy it here, and I disagree. “The bottom line is simple: Viral marketing, in which a conversation about a product is actively encouraged, can turn good or bad in ways that traditional marketing and advertising typically cannot. Unless a business pays careful attention to the tone of that conversation, the company could find itself shelling out millions on a viral ad campaign, only to have the unwanted effect of decreasing sales instead of increasing them.” I copied the whole comment over, because I agree with the first part. Yes, viral marketing can turn bad. But then it says business need to pay attention to the tone of the conversation. The underlying study (from what I can see) doesn’t say that. It says that your products have to meet expectations. In other words, it’s saying you can’t just manage the tone because it is out of your control.

Implications for Manufacturers
So what should manufacturers do? Learn from the study. What I hear is don’t over-hype your products, and don’t try to push a bad product through social media. It seems to me the harder you push how great a product is, the more likely you are to get dissenting view from customers. The study doesn’t say your product has to be good, it just has to meet expectations at least half-way.

Continue to experiment and learn. Social media is changing the way we interact with products. Be a part of the change and experiment. The last bit or preliminary data I will share from the Kalypso study is that those that are doing it are seeing business benefits (revenue, time to market, reduced cost). This is real, get on it.

So that was a quick peek into some recent research on social networking and business, I hope you found it interesting. Does the research reflect your experiences? Do you see it differently? Let us know what it looks like from your perspective. Please feel free to review free research and white papers about product innovation and product development from Tech-Clarity.

A quick peek into some research on … product compliance for formula-based companies in a report titled Issue in Focus: Product Compliance – The Hidden Tax on Innovation: Enhancing Innovation in Formula-Based Companies through Real-time, Automated Compliance Monitoring. One of the predictions that came true in Mythbusing Product Innovation and PLM 2010 Predictions was that PLM would expand to address product compliance. My past reports, such as the report on Making Product Compliance Sustainable, focused primarily on regulations like RoHS and REACH that impact product people that make discrete items like electronic or mechanical devices. But formula- and recipe-based product developers face their own set of compliance challenges. This report focused on their needs, and how PLM systems can help reduce the manual workload burden placed on them by product compliance. 

The Research Findings

The research included interviews with consumer goods companies including Revlon, Zotos International (a division of Shiseido Co,. Ltd.) and made a few key observations:

•  Early compliance checking helps avoid rework and speed time to market in product formulation and testing by ensuring product contents are acceptable early in the product development process
• Manual product compliance processes are slow, inneficient, and inhibits innovation by forcing key innovators to spend inordinate amounts of time looking up information and making it difficult for them to try new, innovative ideas quickly and with confidence

Given the need for early compliance checking and the potential for these checks to grind product innovation to a halt, companies appear to be between a rock and a hard place. The report goes on to discuss how real-time, automated compliance monitoring can help relieve the innovator of this compliance burden so they can focus on developing great products. This requires an infrastructure that:

• Provides knowledge of global compliance requirements
• Recognizes the full composition of their raw materials
• Understands the product formula as it is being designed
• Checks compliance real-time as the developer innovates
• Provides full, electronic documentation of compliance

There is more detail on each of these requirements in the report.

Implications for (Formula-Based) Manufacturers

For companies that develop and manufacture formula-based products, the compliance challenge will only grow. Government regulations and consumer sentiment will continue to push companies with greater scrutiny of their product contents, and restricted material lists will continue to grow. On the other hand, consumers will continue to reward innovate new products. In order to meet both demands, product developers must have the right tools to innovate rapidly, but with the comfort that there is a system behind them that will keep them out of compliance trouble.

So that was a quick peek into some recent research on making product compliance more efficient for product developrs in formula-based industries, I hope you found it interesting. Does the research reflect your experiences? Do you see it differently? Let us know what it looks like from your perspective. Please feel free to review more free research and white papers about PLM and other enterprise software for manufacturers from Tech-Clarity.

What I learned this week… came from a Twitter message responding to my blog. I thought that seemed appriorate given that we were discussing social computing and social networking. The message was in response to a post the other day about Going Social with Product Development, pointing me to the embedded video. The post discussed the use of social computing techniques in product innovation, product development, and engineering. 

Note: Thanks to 3DPerspectives for passing this along

The Video

This video is a very straight-forward explanation, using simple terms and a practical example. Well done.

Implications for Manufacturers

I focused more on the internal uses in my research, because I feel those will be the first capabilities adopted. What I liked is that this video really focuses more on innovation in external communities. While I think this kind of example involves more thinking in regards to where the business value lies as compared to collaboration within the corporate social network, I also think the potential for developing a unique and compelling business model is higher and may offer higher returns. I think it’s good for manufacturers to start adopting social computing in their current PLM environment, while exploring the benefits of leveraging external communities for greater innovation.

So just a short and sweet link to the video with some of my thoughts, I hope you found it interesting.

A quick peek into some research on … how manufacturers are taking advantage of social computing and “Web 2.0″ technologies to raise the bar on product development performance in my new report Tech-Clarity Insight: Going Social with Product Development: Improving Product Development Performance with Social Computing. The paper discusses the intersection of social computing and new product development (NPD) processes and tools. I have posted frequently about the intersection of social computing and PLM and product innovation, and this research provides some examples on how these strategies are starting to play out for manufacturers like Microsoft (think PC hardware and game consoles, not Windows) and Pitney Bowes.
The Research Findings

The paper discusses uses of social computing from the basics of collaboration to the adoption of more innovative business models. Most companies will start with more conservative extensions to existing processes like design collaboration. In these cases, incorporating tools like instant messaging into the product development workflow can help streamline interactions. Capabilities like presence detection and interactive file sharing help make existing collaborative processes better. For many companies, these capabilities are readily available and require little change to underlying business processes.

Other forms of communication, such as blogs and wikis, offer a combination of better communication and knowledge management. These online discussion tools change the product dialogue from a one-way push of information to a two-way, interactive, dynamic, electronic conversation to help people better share information and ideas. Beyond better communication, the simple fact that the conversations are happening centrally and in electronic format turns product-related discussions and decision-making into a searchable knowledge asset.

Social computing can also be used to extend collaboration and information sharing to broader communities. This allows product developers to collaborate with the people they know, but also extend their search to find others in the corporate network that have valuable knowledge and expertise that previously would have gone untapped. By connecting people around product and project context, companies enable “social discovery” which fundamentally changes the available talent and expertise available to a project.

Beyond the corporate community, companies can also develop new product intellectual property (IP) from social computing. By extending the online community to customers and the market, new opportunities to gather “voice of the customer” and test ideas emerge. While these concepts require more change to the business and the way it operates, they also offer an even greater potential return by leveraging larger communities.

Implications for Manufacturers
The implications break down into two categories. The first implications are about the applicability and importance of social computing in product development. You have probably heard me talk about this before, and this report helps confirm and expand my thoughts on the subject. There is clearly something of value happening with the intersection of this exciting and popular new way of communicating and the business of developing profitable products.

The second set of implications fall into the category of practical advice and lessons learned to take advantage of this new opportunity. The opportunities are available, but the most important thing is that manufacturers don’t discount the applicability of social computing concepts based on their personal experience with Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, or any other social networking sites. Manufacturers have to see through the use of these communication techniques for “fun” and see the significant business potential. This potential will likely never come from the public social networking sites, but instead by incorporating these “Web 2.0″ concepts into existing infrastructure and product development solutions. This is the most practical method to both achieve the value, but also ensure that product data and intellectual property (IP) is protected and that the solutions are used in the right context – to improve products and projects that drive corporate profitability.

So that was a quick peek into some recent research on social computing in product development, I hope you found it interesting. Does the research reflect your experiences? Do you see it differently? Let us know what it looks like from your perspective.

Please feel free to review more free research and white papers about PLM and other enterprise software for manufacturers from Tech-Clarity

A quick peek into some research on … the use of business intelligence in PLM provides insight on taking advantage of the tremendous amount of product data  accumulating in today’s PLM systems. The research discusses how the maturation of manufacturers’ PLM implementations has created a tremendous volume of untapped information that can be leveraged to improve product innovation, product development, and engineering performance. As it has in previous enterprise applications (ERP, CRM, SCM, others), the time has come for manufacturers to tap into their growing information goldmines through the use of business intelligence (BI) tools.

The Research Findings

The research points out two parallel trends in PLM implementations today:

• Manufacturers have moved forward along the PLM implementation maturity curve – meaning they now have stable implementations and clean data
• PLM has evolved and expanded to incorporate more valuable, business-focused data in addition to technical information – meaning the data to be mined covers a broader spectrum of the product lifecycle, including cost, projects, sourcing, service, and more in addition to purely technical engineering data

The result of these two trends is that there is now a lot more usable business data in PLM. The report points out a number of areas of value that can be mined from the data, including savings on new product development timelines, closing the loop from service to engineering, improving product quality, analyzing sourcing, and reducing cost. In short, it shows that value can be extracted by improving pretty much any part of the product innovation, product development, and engineering processes. Please read the report for more details and examples.

Implications for Manufacturers

The message for manufacturers is that “there is gold in them hills” …. errrrrr, in those databases. The research also points out some special considerations for business intelligence in a PLM environment. For most manufacturers, applying a BI tool is not the difficult part. In fact, they probably have (at least) one tool available in their IT toolkit. But before diving in from a technical perspective, manufacturers need to be very careful to consider security, IP protection, and regulatory requirements that surround this very sensitive data. Manufacturers should also look for ways to leverage PLM vendor offerings or partnerships that give them a ready-made view into the PLM data and security model, to avoid spending time recreating the wheel and potentially making mistakes that provide misleading “facts” that people will trust. As the report says, “Developing an effective BI in PLM strategy also requires knowledge of the engineering and product development domains and the specific software applications being mined.”

So that was a quick peek into some recent research on the maturation of PLM implementations and the opportunity it provides for data mining in PLM, I hope you found it interesting. Does the research reflect your experiences? Do you see it differently? Let us know what it looks like from your perspective.

Please feel free to review more free research and white papers about PLM and other enterprise software for manufacturers from Tech-Clarity.

I had the chance to talk with … Jim Todhunter and the team at Invention Machine about the new product release they announced today. There are lot of things that I like in the release designed to help further Invention Machine’s ability to operationalize innovation. But what really struck me was the goal of this release to improve “Every Day Innovation” in a procedural, sustainable way.

What do they Do?

In short, and in my words, Invention Machine offers a software solution that helps manufacturers turn innovation into a repeatable process. This is what I like to call “operationalizing innovation” as opposed to leaving innovation to chance. Invention Machine does this through a combination of:

• Task-oriented innovation workflows
• Packaged innovation, engineering and problem-solving tools and methodologies
• Innovation and engineering knowledge management and search

Invention Machine is a very unique company, and one that many have a hard time grasping exactly what they do. But what always strikes me is that they have a very impressive list of customers. I have had the chance to talk with quite a few of these customers, and they are all positive about what Invention Machine has done for them. So even if they are hard to understand, they are definitely worth a look.

What’s New?

So what is new in the release? There is quite a bit. Their Goldfire 5.5 launch adds new capabilities across the product line, and also introduces a new product called “Goldfire Insight.” The goal of this solution is to boost deployment of Goldfire to the “every day” innovators. Innovation comes in many forms, and Invention Machine is trying to extend their capabilities into every day engineering and innovation problem solving instead of just generating the big ideas or solving big, hairy problems. Jim Todhunter talks about the “little i” ind of innovation in addition to the “big I” type. Maybe one way to think of it is that Goldfire Insight helps the every day innovator stand on the shoulders of the master innovators to turn innovation into reality.

There are also new capabilities in the existing solutions. One of these capabilities is a question answering technology that helps innovators find the knowledge they need to get their jobs done without reinventing the wheel. There is also a new Knowledge Navigator that helps return knowledge in logical categories or “lenses,” providing order and intelligence to unstructured information and query results by leveraging Invention Machine’s strong semantic search capabilities.

There is also a new Research Guide that I am pretty interested in seeing in action at customers. The Research Guide not only helps capture engineering knowledge, it helps capture the innovation and decision-making process. Think of dynamically creating a “mind map” during a research or innovation project that documents the path you took (and links to the knowledge you uncovered) so you can go back and revisit it at a later time. This creates a new source of knowledge, by documenting the innovation process and the innovation path to create new knowledge. Pretty compelling. I liked the way Jim Todhunter explained it (possibly paraphrased):

Information -> enables -> Communities -> to perform -> Innovation -> which generates -> Information

So that’s what I hear from Invention Machine, I hope you found it useful. What do you think? What else should I have asked them?

What I learned this week … was sparked by some recent social networking announcements on people tagging. The most recent was that Facebook plans to offer tagging very similar to what Twitter offers. This follows other announcements around geo-tagging, but I am really most interested in how tagging people can help in product development (and overall in product innovation).

Tag – You are It!

Most people that use social networks are getting used to tagging, particularly those that use Twitter. In Facebook, people are used to seeing tagging on uploaded photos. So what is tagging? Tagging (for our purposes here) is just associated a person with content. There are other forms of tagging as well, such as the “#” tagging or “hashcodes” in Twitter than help associate content with events or topics, keyword tagging, etc. But what I am talking about is simply including an individual’s identification along with the content. But I am not talking about their name, I am talking about tagging their online presence. Tagging isn’t just letting people know who is involved. The power of people tagging comes when associating the person to the context allows the tag to be followed to see or learn more about the person tagged.

Quick Example

OK, you are reading a blog on social networking so you probably already know this, but just in case I will provide a quick personal example:

I attended a conference, and one of the people I follow on Twitter mentioned that they were going to the bar with two other individuals. Not that interesting, right? Except that they were at the same conference that I was and my contact tagged the two people by including their “@” codes, or their Twitter identities. That meant that anybody that followed any of the three would now know they were getting together for a drink. So what? I recognized one of the names as somebody I wanted to meet. The second name I didn’t recognize, but I followed the link to the profile and found out it was another blogger that I would like to meet. In short, my network expanded by two new people that day because one friend tagged the other two. And, I got a free drink out of it too.

Can We Get Back to Product Development Please?

Thanks for your patience with the aside, I try not to assume everybody knows about things like tagging. So how does this apply to product development? Let’s take a quick example of status reports. If a status report mentions that @Engineer is working on a problem, I might read that status report and have something to offer. I could instantly click and connect with the tagged person (hopefully with some security settings in place) and offer my advice. Or, perhaps it is a year later and I am facing that same problem. I might search on the issue and find this old status report. Then, I see that @Engineer faced this problem a year ago. I could follow the link and find additional content related to the tagged individual that might help me with my problem, or connect to ask for advice.

Implications for Manufacturers

It’s Monday, I will keep this short. Tagging is a very important part of social computing, and highly applicable to PLM because product development is fundamentally a people-driven process. This is just one more reason that social computing in PLM makes so much sense to me.

Thinking of tagging in product development also ties strongly into past discussions such as Oleg’s PLM, don’t fight processes – focus on people! and other related discussions in the PLM community of late. It is also very important when considering the importance of social discovery and how social computing drives innovation.

So I believe tagging people in social computing will be helpful to product developers, I hope you found it interesting. Who knew? I didn’t, if you did let us know about it.

What I learned this week … came from some research I have been doing for a client. As a part of it, I have been spending a little more time getting to know the “Idea Management” software space. The conclusion that I am drawing is that while there are some mature software solutions to manage ideas, there are also a host of other specialty solutions that help generate the idea in the first place, analyze the idea, or further develop it.

Beyond Managing Ideas

I have always felt that there is more to idea management than “managing ideas.” That isn’t to say that simply managing ideas – including capturing them, categorizing them, and making them easy to retrieve is not important. What I am finding is that there are also solutions that:

• Filter and group ideas
• Prioritize and rank ideas
• Collaborate on ideas

Before Managing IdeasAnd of course in order to manage ideas, you have to have some. This is where some really creative solutions are popping up (or at least popping onto my radar screen). There are solutions that:

• Stimulate the submission of ideas
• Target and focus ideas on specific topics
• Provide a marketplace for those with ideas to meet those searching for them
• Account for rewards and recognition for ideas / innovation

Ideas and Social Computing

Some other interesting things I am running across include companies that are leveraging social networking and social computing to tap into communities for ideas and innovation. This is a very interesting topic by itself, including crowdsourcing among other techniques.

Idea Management as an Ecosystem

So there is a lot of variety in the “Idea Management” software ecosystem. Of course, many solutions cover more than one of the capabilities listed above. But like PLM – and even more than PLM – there is not a uniform, mature footprint shared by the competing solutions. There is a lot of innovation happening in innovation software.

So that is what I learned, I hope you found it interesting. Who knew? I didn’t, if you did let us know about it. And if you know more than I do, please share it with all of us. What am I missing? What vendors should I learn more about?