The Ideation Imperative – The importance of trying new things in driving success

Posted on: March 8th, 2017

Organizations and their executives are increasingly focusing on strategy formulation as a route to drive success. However, even brilliant strategy without being backed by ideation can never perform up to expectations.

Rather, a clear and communicable ideation that lays out the alignment between the three elements of purpose, identity and long-range intention is needed.

Implementation of such an ‘ideation Imperative’ will provide a way to gauge the current reality in an organization and generate ideas on what strategy to adopt to drive success.

The importance of ideation in executing strategy and why it’s an imperative for success

Ideation is vital in executing strategy because it comprises the fundamental underpinning of why the organization does what it does, what its brand stands for, and what the organization determines as its goals. The reason ideation is an imperative is that in order to lead an enterprise, there must be an overall context that shapes decisions.

This initiates actions in the organization that goes well beyond what is possible from a command-and-control perspective.

Ensuring that the ‘Ideation Imperative’ brings success

Driving success through ideation requires a great deal more than simply announcing that the organization is open to ideas. Successful ideation relies on clearly defining its steps, which include Generation, Selection and Implementation, with organizations managing each step with appropriate people and processes in place.

Additionally, to drive innovation through ideation, the organization will have to sustain the right corporate culture, starting from the top management of the company.

Ideation through new channels

As companies continue to evolve their business strategies to become more social and collaborative, ideation will make its way through new sources, such as customers. Nowadays, customers are eager to provide feedback and share ideas with companies.

With the ease of social channels, they are able to do so whether solicited or unsolicited. In order to tap into this ideation pool, companies will have to find new ways to engage with their customers to capture such feedback.

In conclusion, ideation is a very useful for successful strategy implementation. However, for organizations to achieve success, they have to establish workflows and criteria for evaluating the results. Then they must take action on the best ideas.

In addition, organizations have to set up clear and regular communication with all the participants in the ideation process. This will let them know where the ideas stand and will keep them motivated to provide further to the ideation cycle.

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