Collective ideation and innovation processes

Description

Innovation is an important determinant of organizations’ performance, success, competitive advantage, and ultimately survival. Therefore, processes that engage organizations’ internal and external constituents to generate, collect, and implement ideas and suggestions sits at the crux of successful innovation strategies (Anderson, Potocnik, and Zhou, 2014).

Collective ideation (co-ideation) processes involve activities such as generating, editing, co-creating, and voting novel and useful ideas. While it can be argued that co-ideation is a new and distinct phenomena, more recent approaches have shown that it is the norm rather than the exception in innovation, particularly because creativity research has tended to focus on ideas at an individual-level rather than as a dynamic social process (Coldevin et al., 2018).

Increasingly, organizations that engage with internal and external collective ideation processes use IT platforms to facilitate idea generation (Perry-Smith and Mannucci, 2017). Research has shown that IT-mediated collective ideation can improve the quality of the ideas when compared to individual ideation processes (Hargadon, 2006; Harvey and Kou, 2013). However, despite the hype around IT-mediated collective ideation processes, little is known about collective ideation and implementation and how IT-mediated collective ideation translates into better practices, processes, products, services, or business models (Anderson et al., 2014; Amabile, 1996).

Essentially, we need to understand more about not only how to engage internal and external constituents in collective ideation processes but also under which conditions IT-mediated ideation processes shape innovation inside organizations from ideation to implementation.

Our aim is to understand how organisations can engage internal and external constituents in collective ideation processes, and how such processes help to trigger organisational innovation.

Objectives:

1. Understanding the best approaches for engaging internal and external constituents in collective ideation processes to solve the most significant strategic and innovative challenges faced by organisations;
2. Assess the impact of collective ideation in terms of implementation of better processes, products, services, or business models.