Ideas for innovations are everywhere: within the organization, but also outside the organization. In order to achieve success, it is important to capture and further develop these ideas and to measure their value to finally implement them at the right time. As an innovation manager, you want to hear the ideas of your employees but also those of your customers, suppliers and partners. The best way to capture ideas is to collect them independent of time, place and device.

Within Accept Mission, our innovation software, you can create inboxes for specific subjects or themes to collect ideas easily. You decide who has access to the idea inboxes and who will eventually do the first screening of ideas. Ideas can easily be added by users across all devices and from every location. There are many configurable settings per inbox. For example, you can decide if users post ideas and comments based on their real identify or go ‘undercover’. This kind of feature will help to get the most and the best ideas. The inbox makes it easy for you to collect ideas from departments for products, or for business challenges.

People work together more digitally than ever. Connecting people and engaging them to work together to build the best results for the organization can be hard. You need to engage people from different teams, locations or even countries. It doesn’t matter if they are employees, partners or customers – you need a platform to collect ideas from different sources. A survey will not do the job. Physical workshops and brainstorms sound interesting, but take too much time and money. What you need is a single place to engage people so they can collaborate on ideas, no matter where they are, no matter on what device, which time or what skillset they have.

Accept Mission is a complete platform on which users can work together on ideas and solve challenges together. It is not about generating the best ideas. You will get the best solutions if people from different backgrounds collaborate to generate the best ideas. Users can add ideas, vote on ideas of others, comment and improve them and score them, to get the best ideas. You can start online brainstorms, innovation campaigns, open up an inbox and do selection missions for smart decision making. What question will boost the discussion of your audience?

Before investing a significant amount of time and resources in developing a product or concept no one wants, an idea should be validated. Make sure that your ideas are based on a real demand, otherwise there’s a real risk of them becoming ‘just nice ideas’. A good way to validate ideas is to conduct interviews or set up user panels. It is difficult to keep the interview unbiased while you are enthusiastic about your own idea. A large group would take a lot of time, therefore it’s very important to have a target group to validate the idea(s).

Let the end users validate the ideas with the selection tool. With this tool, the audience can give feedback in a systematic way. Gather all validation data in one place including feedback. With Accept Mission you are able to set up target groups. With this target group you no longer need to invite people personally, but you can invite a selected group at the same time. Because it is time and place independent, you can reach a large group of internal and external people within a short time.

Everyone likes brainstorming. The downside of traditional brainstorming is that it is hard to get people in the same room. Even if you have the people in the same room, you may wonder if these are the people who should be involved. Also, working out the outcome of the brainstorm costs a lot of time. Therefore it costs a lot of time and money to organize sessions like these. Also the role of the facilitator is extremely important for the brainstorm to be successful. Sometimes, you need ideas faster and you want more people who can join and share ideas.

Use Accept Mission to organize brainstorms time, place and device independent. Build your mission (use one of our many templates), invite a group of agents, publish and sit back to see the results fly in. It is easy to invite external parties while people are undercover and it is time and place independent. Within a short period of time, a clear report will be generated, including scores of the participants. Use the best ideas to create amazing innovation projects.

A major challenge within the organization is that a lot of knowledge is unused. When you have selected ideas you want the ideas becomes something real. Let people with common knowledge build on ideas. Find people based on knowledge expertise, connect and discuss the subject.

Create profiles based on expertise. Then, invite the right people based on these profiles. All knowledge at a central point. Use an inbox to put ideas in there. Have people discuss based on common knowledge, trends and developments and knowledge components. All this knowledge will help to achieve the best result.