Ideas Management Platform: Solidifying Leadership for Innovation

“Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” – Warren Bennis

Innovation is the ability to create something novel which leads to growth in your business. And it comes from newer ideas. In fact, ideas rest at the center of any innovation. So, in this age of customers and employees, organizations let their ideas take the center stage as they set a business up for success.

Modern organizations make use of online communities to bring their customers and employees together on one platform for idea creation and exchange of creative thoughts. And if you have a Salesforce-powered online community, you are privileged to use its Ideas component. However, when ideas come from all nooks and corners, they become difficult to manage. An ideas management platform, therefore, goes a long way to ensure they are managed well.

However, quite often, bringing innovation plans and ideas to fruition can be overwhelming and unmanageable. That’s where leadership helps in bringing them into focus.

In this blog post, we will discuss the role of a leader in an organization’s innovation process and how an ideas management platform solidifies it for a leader.

Leadership and Innovation

It is imperative to drive an online community through effective leadership. It provides the much-needed direction to communication that takes place in a community. It is up to the leaders to keep the community interactions productive for a business. And as innovations are a result of great minds working together, a successful leader must think on the lines of:

Identifying the Meaning of Innovation for an Organization

It’s imperative to figure out what innovation means to an organization. Having a clear vision of your innovation goals will help you derive business objectives and critical metrics to measure the success of your initiatives.

Establishing the Metrics of Successful Innovation

Once a leader is able to establish the organizational goals for innovation, they must be able to define what its success would mean to the business.

Overcoming the Barriers of Innovation

Successful leadership stems from not only generating ideas but also fighting the barriers that come in the way of their execution.

Leadership’s Role and Responsibilities in the Idea Management for Innovation

At all phases of the innovation process, right from idea gathering and development to its execution, a leader’s role is crucial in giving direction and streamlining the process. Here’s a quick look at some ways an organizational leader can contribute to idea generation, its management, and turning it into an innovation.

Bringing the Right Minds Together

The foremost responsibility of a leader is to encourage customers and employees to bring out their creative juices. A leader helps encourage imagination in them. For that purpose, they can initiate various engagement activities in their online communities, so that the right minds come together for idea generation.

Encouraging Collaboration and Communication

Idea management requires collaboration and a leader should create opportunities for people to interact and collaborate in order to build better chances of breakthrough creativity. Polls, Q&As, and activities that require collective efforts from employees or customers go a long way to encourage collaboration.

Improving Authenticity

This pertains to publishing authentic content on your online community. When customers visit the community, they wish to read content that is authentic and helps them resolve their issues. Thought leadership articles and special edition newsletters amongst others will help increase customers’ interest in discussions. It will also encourage them to bring their ideas on board about what they would want to be informed about and share suggestions about which new areas your organization should explore.

Without the right leadership, it is difficult to bring new thoughts and ideas to fruition and make them reach the innovation stage. A leader acts as the driving force to guide employees and inspire the customers to come up with ideas and steer them towards reality.

IdeasPro – Leveling Up Ideas Management on Communities

Salesforce provides an Ideas platform that allows employees, customers, and partners to collaborate, exchange ideas, and create an innovative future for an organization. IdeasPro, a Salesforce-native, Lightning-ready solution developed by Grazitti Interactive helps customize Salesforce’s ideas component for effective management of ideas.

Here are the key features of IdeasPro that make it a comprehensive ideation solution.

Idea Account Mapping

Whenever the participants in the community create or like an idea or comment, their accounts are mapped. This allows tracking the process of creating and managing ideas.

Profanity Prevention

It helps define abusive words and blocks them from being posted on the community. This helps maintain integrity in the community and promotes an amicable relationship between participants.

Idea Merge Scheduler

It helps minimize duplicity by merging similar ideas in the community under a parent idea.

Email-to-Ideas

IdeasPro enables auto-conversion of incoming ideas emails into ideas and saves them into the Salesforce instance.

Idea Deflection

It prevents the creation of duplicate data by pinpointing a similar and already existing idea or article on the community.

Idea Category Subscription

IdeasPro allows users to subscribe to the category of an existing idea, and to get notified of any updates on an existing idea.

Multiple Attachments to Ideas

It enhances the standard Salesforce functionality of its Ideas component, which allows only one attachment on an idea with a maximum size limit of 25 MB, by allowing multiple attachments to an idea with an extended size limit.

Want Seamless Management of Ideas on Your Salesforce-Powered Community? Let’s Talk!