It's Budget Request Time! Business reasons for collaborative innovation technology: Cost Justification for your idea management software

• '
  So think about the value of having new products
  developed faster. What's that
  worth?
• '
  Think about the value of feedback from your
  teams that produce improvements in your processes.
• '
  Think about how important it would be if someone
  points out an industry trend that leads your organization to do things
  completely differently and you get into a whole new business.
• '
  Think about the value of challenging your
  workforce to come up with solutions to the problems management discuss and
  worry about'.and having them come up with a thought management has never
  considered.
• '
  Or if you're doing all this innovation activity
  without a collaborative innovation system, think about how much time is spent
  manually filtering through ideas trying to figure out which ones are best, what
  categories they go into, etc. A set of
  technologies can make these people more productive and you can count these
  hours involved.

Let's get started
with the math:

1.
Connect
and Development. I wrote about this a year ago. It has been proven it is more cost effective
to 'Connect and Develop' rather than merely rely on 'Research and
Development'. Others out there have
already put the time, energy and money into finding a solution just like the
one you seek. It may be for a different
industry or application, but if you can find it, it's cheaper and faster than
asking your internal teams to start working on it. The famous example is the 'slicer' needed for
industrial plastics that used the slicer developed for cheese with some
modifications. By asking other users in
a collaborative software arena, you can tap into the collective knowledge of
many others to find out what you need to know.

Count how much time is saved by connecting
with experts to get answers that replace time doing research. Add that value to your total.

2.
Finding Experts.
You can't possibly know everyone who works at your company, let alone
have an in depth knowledge of their expertise.
Collaborative software monitors the contributions of the user community,
noting behavior and identifying certain skill sets. If a user constantly makes contributions
about 'slicers' (might as well stick to the same example) you can find these
folks when you search the topic. And
when you're looking at an idea in the collaborative system that has to do with
slicers, the software can actually suggest slicer experts. A bonus here is when you're looking at a
potential expert, the technology can identify other users who have similar
attributes with measurable relevancy scores ('if you find this person
interesting, you may find these other people interesting as well').

Count
how much time is saved by connecting with experts to get answers that replace
time doing research. Add that value to
your total.

3.
Saving Money.
No one knows your business as well as your coworkers. As they spend their days working they note small
flaws that can be easily corrected. This
is the old 'suggestion box' story. Someone
makes a contribution to the collaborative innovation system of this
'unsolicited idea'. 'If we just did X,
we'd be more productive and save money'.
By having the 'crowd' of coworkers vote on these types of 'incremental
innovations' the organizations can get a list of the best of these ideas. In other words, if the posted idea gets a lot
of votes, it must have some merit.

Count how much time is saved in improved
processes and the value of that time.
Add that value to your total.

4.
Making money.
Your collaborative innovation system can enable submissions that turn
into new sources of revenue. Your sales
people and customer service types are in contact with your customers. If the customers are asking for something
that your company is not offering, the submission of this 'idea' can alert
product management types that a need in the marketplace exists. Better yet, you can open up the innovation
social network to your customers, providing a place for them to submit their
ideas for new products.

Count the additional revenue to be realized
from new products and the speed you bring those products to market. Add that value to your total.

5.
Problem Solving.
When someone on your team has a problem, they can use the collaborativeinnovation system to find answers. First
off they can search the existing contributions in the hopes of finding answers,
bring up those contributions and review them.
If that fails, they can 'ask' the rest of population for help. 'I'm running into a problem, has anyone else
out there dealt with this issue before'?
Coworkers make submissions to help.
Problem solving is a great scenario to open up the collaborative
innovation social network to your company's vendors. Your suppliers might be able to point out
they have a solution to answer one of the problems you're facing.

Count
the time saved by getting rapid answers to questions rather than spent
researching an answer. Add that value to
your total.

6.
Getting into new businesses. We all know the story of the buggy whip
manufacturer. They made better and
better buggy whips, buying out his competitors, eventually having a monopoly on
the buggy whip market. But someone had
to stand up and say 'Hey wait a minute' shouldn't we be making automobiles
instead'? Breakthrough or Disruptive
Innovations are typically the result of 'Solicited Ideas', likely submitted as
a result of a Challenge or a Campaign.
With a collaborative innovation software system, management can tell
everyone, 'listen I'm glad you guys are all talking together, but do us all a
favor and talk about this:'' With this being the issues management has
identified as mission critical.
Challenges might ask the worker population questions like 'Where do you
see our industry in five years'? or 'What new products should we offer our
customers'?

This one is tougher, but consider how much revenue you can add to the
total realized as a result of getting into a market you otherwise would have
missed. Add that to your total.