Ideation is an essential step in the innovation process. In order to engineer truly innovative solutions, ideation must be built into an organization’s intellectual property strategy. Technological advances have made it possible to implement automation within ideation. Automating and streamlining the ideation process has the potential to improve the quality of your R&D team’s ideas, allocate resources more efficiently, and monetize your novel ideas faster.
Digitizing and automating the ideation process removes barriers to collaboration across teams and entities. When you no longer rely solely on in-person sessions for new ideas and instead reserve digital space for research and brainstorming, it is possible to constantly gather ideas from a variety of sources. When ideas are documented on a regular basis in a common platform, it also becomes easier to move these ideas to the next step in the innovation cycle.
Opportunities for Automation
The are multiple opportunities to automate throughout the ideation process. Examine your organization’s current process and identify steps that could benefit from automation. Eliminating the need for human input at multiple points, which can slow down the innovation process, allows you to get to market faster with more novel ideas.
Trend Analysis
To accommodate both customer needs and competitive advantage, it’s important to understand the trends in your industry. Automated and AI-enabled tools can gather the most relevant developments and use them to identify potential competitors, partners, emerging technologies, and markets. This kind of predictive analytics can sort massive amounts of data into impactful insights that point your R&D team in the right direction.
Idea Documentation
When ideas are documented digitally, it is easier to implement automation within the ideation process. Relying solely on in-person, management-led ideation can limit who contributes ideas and how quickly they are evaluated and acted on. Software can push ideas through the innovation cycle with automated notifications, collaboration, consolidation, and incentives.
Novelty Scoring
Choosing which ideas are worth pursuing is another potential roadblock in the innovation cycle. More than three-quarters of firms “have too many projects and an overloaded development pipeline.” Leaning on automated decision making early in the innovation cycle allows for more strategic distribution of R&D resources. Our Technology Vitality Report (TVR) gives each idea a novelty score, making it easy to allocate resources to the most promising innovations.