Innovation on Innovation - How to make elephants dance

2008-06-05 Software-Engineering Management Innovation

Yesterday I went out and had a pint with Sailesh Panchal. He is an Enterprise Architect with the payments division of Lloyds TSB in London. Part of his responsibility is to foster innovation in Lloyds.

Obviously innovation needs to be directed towards a measurable goal/target/impact for the customer and/or the company. To judge, if an/the idea was just a good idea or a real innovation, you must be able to show some measurable ROI in a defined timeframe. Depending on the "size" of the innovation and the size of the organizations these timeframes can be easily 6 month or more. That's a long way down the road.

Question is: What kind of signposts can you create to judge ideas earlier?

We are looking for innovative ideas to foster, measure and rank (by value and relevance) innovative ideas in large enterprises. Sailesh is currently contemplating about implementing a system/culture, where the value of ideas gets rated by the number of citations that are made, means if you and your idea gets cited a lot the likelyhood that it is a good idea is high(er).

Just wondering ... communities.iona.com is implemented with Jive. We have a ranking for the number of posts a given individual creates. But there are markups that you can use to reference other docs and threads. Just wondering, if it would be possible to have a ranking for the docs and threads that get referenced the most?

Just wondering ...