Agile Work Innovation Management Software Glossary

Definition of commonly used terms and abbreviations you may come across when working on an innovation management software initiative.

A

Adaptive event-based rule engine: A method of injecting custom behavior into the system to automate the administration process.

Age of Innovation: In the age of innovation, organizations must constantly innovate to remain competitive. Organizations must continue to find new ways to create and develop ideas in their innovation pipeline internally from their employees, as well as through crowdsourcing, co-creation and open innovation. This can sometimes even include collaborating with their competitors.

Agile: Being able to quickly adapt and make changes through the process of consistently iterating

Agile Innovation: Experimenting on your top ideas to make sure they are fully viable and giving you the opportunity to fail fast on those that are not

Agile Work Innovation:  Consists of a set of services and a software platform that enables an organization’s employees, customers, and suppliers to collaborate on and capture new ideas. Ideas developed through focused innovation activities ultimately become projects to explore and invest in that lead to new and improved products or services, business model transformations, new market opportunities, and work process improvements all the while driving employee engagement in your organization.

Auditing: Our system allows you to view a full audit trail of system activity, along with timestamps for maximum visibility.

Approved Ideas: Ideas that make it passed evaluation and move to the implementation pipeline

B

Black Hole Syndrome: Idea suggestions that do not gain the visibility or traction

Business Case: A justification to move forward with a proposed innovation

Business Model Innovation: Incremental or large scale changes to your business model to drive growth

Brainstorming: The action of putting together the collective brain trust of a group and generating ideas

Breakthrough Innovation: Innovations that generate massive sums of revenue and change the overall landscape of an organization

Business Rule: A rule that defines or constrains various aspects of a business process and always resolves to either true or false. It helps to control and manage the flow of ideas and decisions in your organization.

C

Campaign: See Challenge.

Challenge: A top-down approach to idea generation/management. Executives find areas of opportunity/improvement within their company and ask their end users (employees, suppliers, and partners) for solutions. This in turn, generates idea responses or suggestions that are directly related to the goals and strategy outcomes found within the campaign/challenge.

Chief Innovation Officer: Individual in charge of overseeing innovation in an organization.

Collaboration: The essential ingredient to developing and adding more substance to idea submissions through the unique opinions and perspectives of your users.

Comments: Comments are added by participants on ideas and tasks to develop ideas and collaborate on tasks.

Communities: A way to run your innovation program where you establish different communities such as (marketing, finance, customers, or partners) and only these communities will be able to see their respective campaigns,. Each community may share or have its own unique portal, reports and security settings.

Continuous Improvement: A way of constantly seeking to improve an organizations offerings; either from a process, product or service perspective.

Co-Creation: Employees, customers and suppliers working together to develop an idea into a commercialized or fully realized innovation.

Competitive Advantage: Advantage gained over competitors by using an innovation management solution that will foster your innovation program and process.

Corporate Objectives: the strategic goals and objectives as defined by the organization’s senior management team.

Crowdsourcing: The practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people.

Customer Voice: Ability to gather key insights from customers through open innovation

D

Design Thinking: Design Thinking reduces the uncertainty and risk of innovation by engaging customers and partners in developing a series of prototypes to learn, test and refine concepts through an iterative process to identify unmet needs. Design Thinking is about combining human-centric models to identify critical problems with your current models and offerings then leveraging collaborative technology to develop actionable information that leads to better decision making.

Digital Transformation: The process of shifting an organization from a legacy approach to digitization – working and doing things differently using software, mobile and emerging technologies.

Disruptive Innovation: game changer or breakthrough ideas and their implementation that lead to substantial changes in the organization’s business model or product/service offerings.

Diversity: Seek perspectives from people with differences such as race, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, education, and more to improve customer/employee engagement and accelerate innovation.

E

Ecosystem: An organization collaboration and cross-pollination amongst different stakeholders such as your customers, partners, suppliers .. to create and develop innovative ideas.

Employee Voice: Allowing your employees to express their thoughts and opinions through innovation initiatives.

Employee Resources Groups (ERGs): A grouping of the company’s employees and contractors based on their demographics, background and profile. An example of an ERG is all young highly educated Italians in our North America offices.

Employee Engagement: Captivating the attention of your employees towards your innovation process.

Experimentation: The process of trying out different bits and pieces of an idea before moving forward with a full implementation.

Evaluation: Process of evaluating the different merits of ideas, suggestions and opinions.

F

Fields of Play: The focus areas that require innovation and feedback as defined and communicated by management.

Forms: Forms are used to capture different data points around idea submissions.

Feedback: Also known as Suggestions, is an opportunity for in an innovation or suggestion management program to share their thoughts and comments around ideas, suggestions and opinions.

G

Gamification: The application of typical game elements (ex: points, badges) to other areas of activity to help drive user engagement and sustain continuous collaboration within your innovation program.

H

Hackathon: also known as hack day, hackfest or codefest, is a one or two session where developers of all strips are invited to participate in developing a rough product of a new concept in a very short period of time. Winners of the hackathon may win prizes or simply seek recognition for their contributions to the brainstorming session.

I

Idea: Opinions or suggestions that can lead to potential innovations that generate incremental or substantial value.

Idea Champion: Individual that voluntarily takes extraordinary interest in the adoption, implementation, and success of a cause, policyprogramproject, or product. He or she will typically try to force the idea through entrenched internal resistance to change, and will evangelize it throughout the organization.

Idea Funnel: This is a fundamental concept in innovation management – the activity of collecting a number of ideas and then to progressively and iteratively filtering these ideas until the best ideas are selected for further experimentation. Ultimately some of the best ideas are transformed into winning projects.

Ideate: The act of creating new ideas and contributing to ideas submitted by others in order to find new solutions and opportunities.

Idea Category: A way to categorize the different ideas that flow in your idea tracking system.

Idea Stage: The different stages an idea will go through during its lifecycle such as: open for collaboration, evaluation, approved, implemented.

Idea Stream: The list of ideas related to a specific challenge, community, or ERG.

Ideation: The process around creating ideas and concepts.

Idea Generation: The process around creating, developing, and collaborating around new ideas.

Idea Pipeline: An indicator on where your ideas lie within their lifecycle.

Idea Management: A way to prioritize and create a structured process around evaluating ideas that are being looked at within your organization.

Idea Management System: A solution that provides a systematic approach to managing ideas.

Idea Management Voting Methods: Please see Voting Methods.

Inclusion: Designing challenges and campaigns that drive participation by a diverse group of individuals with different ethnicity, gender, education levels and backgrounds.

Innovation: The process of generating value from an idea or suggestion.

Innovation Center: A designated area used specifically for innovation activities.

Innovation Coordinator: An individual involved with coordinator an organizations innovation program.

Innovation Initiative: A creative program or activity that has the potential to substantially increase innovation activity, improve collaboration on the creation, selection and development of new ideas or suggestions, and result in disruptive change.

Innovation Manager: An individual involved with managing an organizations innovation program.

Innovation Management System: a system that provides a platform to manage innovation activity.  The platform consists of an innovation portal, a workflow engine, configurable forms and business rules, challenge-driven idea management, task automation, decision management, and background processing functions.

Innovation Metrics: The criteria used to measure and showcase the value derived from innovation activities.

Iterate: To refine an idea or innovation over iterations (short cycles) in order to ensure best possible outcome.

J

Jam Session: Jam sessions are typically 2-4 weeks in duration, and are used to mass generate ideas across an organization.

K

L

Launched Ideas: Ideas that have been implemented and are live within the organization.

M

N

O

Open Innovation: The process wherein your innovation program actively involves outside stakeholders such as partners, suppliers or customers to submit and develop ideas and respond to challenges. In addition to the benefits of collaborative co-creation, Open Innovation also increases brand loyalty by demonstrating that the organization is listening to its community, collaborating with external parties, and acting on its community’s ideas, suggestions and feedback.

P

Prioritization: The process in which we decide which ideas, suggestions or innovations to move forward with.

Proof of Concept: An early product that is produced from an idea or innovation to give stakeholders an initial look and feel into it.

Profile: (User profile): is a visual display of personal data associated with a specific user.

Business Process Innovation: the focus of this type of innovation is to fundamentally change the organization’s legacy business models.

Q

R

Recognition: A way of recognizing and highlighting your top innovation program contributors.

Reward: A gift or recognition medium used to compensate users for their participation in the innovation program.

Risk Avoidance: Ideas, suggestions, recommendations, or feedback that are likely to reduce or eliminate a certain type of risk.

Risk Mitigation: Ideas, suggestions, recommendations, or feedback that if implemented are likely to address the issues that arise should an expected event actually occur.

S

Scalable: The ability for an innovation software platform to handle peak usage such as when a large number of participants are engaged in conversations, voting and collaboration on ideas.

Status: Defines the point in which ideas lie in your established workflow. For example: You may have one idea that is currently in “open for collaboration”, and another idea that is in “evaluation”. Each status point includes its own unique forms to be filled by evaluators, and of course, their own set of event-based rules to inject custom behavior into the process.

Silos: When functional departments or business units work only within their respective environments and do not collaborate with constituents from other areas of the organization.

Stage Gate: A staged approach to evaluating the benefits of an idea. (Ex: Evaluation, Proof of Concept, Decision)

Strategy Alignment: Specifies whether the degree to which an idea is aligned with the company’s objectives and overall strategy.

Submitted Ideas: Ideas that have been submitted to the system and are open for collaboration.

Sustainable Innovation: Some organizations see innovation as a random phenomena or an activity that is scheduled from time to time by a specific designated group of people.  Sustainable Innovation consists of a set of work processes and systems that make innovation part of the organization’s DNA, involving everyone in the organization as well as its community, and an everyday regular activity for all participants.

T

Tag Cloud: The most commonly used terms within your innovation program

Tasks: Tasks can be assigned manually, or automatically through an adaptive event-based rule engineTasks are associated with a form that the user needs to review and fill out in order to complete the task.

U

User Experience or UX: Is a design process intended to consider all aspects of an end-user’s wants and needs, and the full spectrum of the user’s interactions with the organization and its offerings to ensure that the user enjoys and fully benefits from the entire experience. True UX goes far beyond giving customers just what they say they want or providing a checklist of features. In order to achieve great UX and customer loyalty in a company’s offerings, there must be a seamless merging of multiple disciplines including business requirements analysis, research of end user roles, development of a customer profile for every user types, design thinking, information and content architecture, and graphical design of all user workflows among other user-centered design methodologies.

V

Voting: Social voting can be enabled within the platform, allowing users to up vote or down vote ideas. A “like” voting system can also be incorporated as well.

Voting Methods:  Various methods can be used to vote on ideas, suggestions and feedback. The most commonly used idea management voting methods are as follows: Likes, Stars, Up/down voting, Classic voting, User limited voting. The Idea Management Voting Methods Guide describes the most commonly used voting methods and provides you with a set of best practices and general guidelines to consider to decide on which method to use in your ideation campaigns and innovation program.

W

Wisdom of the Crowd: The function of involving your community in soliciting feedback, making suggestions, reviewing ideas, and co-creation. The concept of Wisdom of the crowd is that a large number of people can collectively find more creative solutions and make better decisions.

Workflow: Is the sequence of steps through which an idea or innovation decision (or innovation work) passes from creation to archving or completion.

X

Y

Z