Turning ideas into innovations – introducing demand-driven collaborative ideation

Web-enabled tools for ideation are becoming increasingly diffused in companies, but their true impact on innovation performance has been questioned. A factor that can explain some of the so far missing performance of these firm-internal systems for ideation is a lack of attention to the demand-side of ideation. Frequently, the focus of ideation is put more or less unilaterally on the supply-side, with the aim to generate as many or as good ideas as possible, instead of focusing on innovation needs. The aim of this article is to describe and analyse demand-driven collaborative ideation, with a particular emphasis on its management aspects. In order to empirically investigate how to manage this new approach to ideation, a case study of Ericsson, a Swedish multi-national corporation, has been performed. The results highlight that incentives, visibility and resources are three main components of demand-driven collaborative ideation and outline key challenges with this new approach to ideation.