Idea Management: The Importance of Ideas to Design Business Success

Abstract

Ideas are the life-blood of design. This paper presents a theoretical review of current trends in Idea Management (IM) within the front-end of New Product Development (NPD) literature. It identifies 28 success factors for managing and generating ideas within organizations and five emerging research themes. This is important to design as the Fuzzy Front-End (FFE) is one of the greatest opportunities for improving the overall innovation process [1]. Three idea management trends are discussed: (1) quantity versus quality: a shift from generating as many new ideas as possible to maximizing the number of good ideas (2) internal versus external practices: an increasing importance placed on implementing external ideas, and (3) ad-hoc versus systematic: companies are starting to apply a systematic approach to idea generation aligned with corporate design strategy. It will conclude by discussing future research opportunities in idea management and highlights the implications for design managers.