Tag Management For Idea And Innovation Management

In this December update, you read about new features, improvements, and courses to our Accept Mission Idea Management Platform. This month’s improvements are: Tag Management for Better idea management, analyzing trends and selecting the best ideas from your idea funnel.

Introduction Tag Management

When it comes to idea and innovation management, you need to make smart decisions that lead to value creation. You want to focus on ideas that are relevant, have priority, create high business impact or solve the problem. This is a constant process of collecting, searching, reviewing, comparing, sorting and filtering ideas in your idea funnel. When performing idea management, you basically want to narrow down your long list and search for those ideas that have the best match with your business strategy, innovation challenge (problem solving) or product market fit. In order to do this, you need to have the right tools to get relevant insights and be able to say ‘yes, let’s go for this idea!’. Tag Management is one of those smart tools that will help you with: better idea management, getting more insights for smart decision making and analyzing trends. With Accept Mission you can perform tag management in a new and powerful way. This powerful feature is implemented for both idea management and project management.

Tag Management in practice:

A keyword (tag) is a word or phrase that signifies the meaning of your idea or project. In Accept Mission, you can add keywords to idea cards & projects cards. It allows you to see in a glimpse what the main topic is for a particular idea or project. For example, If you look at the following idea: ‘Using blockchain to better track and trace smartphones within the company’, this can be tagged with the following keywords: ‘Blockchain’, ‘track & trace’, ‘smartphones’. All the keywords are stored in a tag library.
If you want to start with tag management, Accept Mission provides a tag library with a basic set of common keywords. We hear you think: But how can we add new tags? All users can create new tags when sharing their ideas. The new tags are stored in the tag library. However, only the admin user has the ability to manage the tag library. As Admin, you can also analyse the usage of tags and spot trends with the available graphs. For instance, you can see how many ideas or projects are linked to certain keywords (tags) or see the most used tags for each campaign. In the graphs, you can just click on any keyword (bubble) and see all the ideas that are associated with this keyword. This is useful if you want to group, or even merge ideas into a bigger solution. There are three main use cases for tag management: 1. Smart decision making, 2. Trend analysis, 3. Boost Idea management:

Use case 1. Smart decision making with tag management

Question: “How can we analyze ideas, find relevant connections and make better decisions?”
Use case: You recently finished an Innovation Campaign to find solutions to a problem. You invited different target groups to share their ideas. The total number of ideas you captured is 131 and contains all kinds of solutions. Now it is time for you to review, compare and combine some ideas. When reviewing ideas and analyzing campaign results, adding innovation tags to idea cards helps you and your campaign team to make better comparisons. As admin, you can add tags but you can also click on the tag in the card and you will see all other ideas associated to that tag. At the end of the day, it allows you to make better decisions on what ideas to follow up on.

Admin view of an idea card. If you click on one of the tags it shows you a list of ideas that are also associated to that tag. This helps you find similar ideas.

Use case 2. Analyzing trends with Tag Management

Question: “What trending topics do we see in our idea funnel?”
Use case: After running several campaigns, your idea funnel filled up with many ideas. As innovation manager, you want to see what topics are trending. Trend analysis is the process of comparing ideas over time to identify consistency, relations and/or trends. It helps you understand how your campaigns performed and helps you make the right decisions. For instance, looking at the graph you can clearly see that ‘Virtual reality’ is being used in many ideas. But looking at keyword ‘Water attraction’, might be very interesting to further investigate. Even though there is no new project defined yet, it could still be interesting to dive deeper into topics like this. This way you see what other ideas, solutions, concepts are related to this tag. By doing this, you can extend your scope and find matching parts to a solution. Using trend analysis is also interesting to understand what is on the mind of your employees or customers when they talk about innovation. This can really open up new opportunities to further investigate.

Image of the Tag cloud showing the associations in idea cards based on tags

Use case 3: Boost Idea management with Tag Management

Question: “How do we find those best ideas?”
As an innovative company, you are constantly organizing innovation campaigns. By doing this, you created a library of ideas that need your attention. But you cannot follow up to all those ideas. No, you need to make smart decisions. Whilst some ideas are very straightforward, make an impact, and are easy/cheap to execute, and received many peer votes, others might need some time to incubate, need additional research or find a matching part to serve a bigger purpose. The best ideas are never single ideas. However, in most cases, ideas that match other ideas can be combined into greater solutions. So, searching for those high-impact ideas in a database might be complex, however by focussing on the best-voted ideas with the Idea Bubble graph will help you narrow down the long list. It makes searching for those relevant solutions more effective.

Image: One of the first steps in the decision-making process is to have participants review the collected ideas. This step is called peer-reviewing. Participants (peers) should give their feedback and thumbs up if they like an idea. By doing this, the long list of ideas can be filtered and sorted based on the number of likes. Using our new idea cloud graph provides a visual presentation of the best ideas based on the number of likes.

New academy course available: “Introduction to Tag Management”

Every month we upload a new course to Academy our Accept Mission in-house training platform. This month we added a course about “Introduction to Tag Management”. This course is aimed at helping innovation teams perform better idea management, allowing innovation teams to make smart decisions. Go check it out in the Academy section of our application.