Have you ever thought about how organizations innovate? Well, every innovation was once just an idea and ideas come your way when least expected. The process of innovation is a simple step-by-step process from the conception of an idea to its effective implementation. That is the reason why today’s businesses value the ideas of their employees and customers.
And for organizations that use and trust Salesforce, they leverage the Ideas Component on Salesforce Experience Cloud to help employees, customers, and partners to come together on a common portal to share their opinions, which may turn out to be game-changing for businesses.
In this blog post, we will share the step-by-step process that businesses follow to innovate and how an ideas management software helps you with it.
Steps of an Innovation Process
Here are some standard steps in an innovation process that bring ideas to life:
Step 1: Idea Generation
The process of innovation begins with the generation of an idea. Ideas are an outcome of creative thoughts. Online communities serve as a great platform to bring forth potential ideas from the ideators whether they are employees or customers.
Step 2: Idea Evaluation
Online communities allow employees and customers to easily bring new ideas on board. Regular comments and feedback on their ideas provide a much-needed motivation to help them come up with potential ideas that, ultimately, contribute to how you see your business, immediately and in the long-term. It enables businesses to screen these ideas and evaluate their feasibility for implementation.
Step 3: Idea Experimentation With a Proof of Concept
After an idea passes its feasibility tests, it then needs to prove that it can help businesses achieve their desired goals. For instance, someone suggests an idea about launching a new product or an extension to the product line. To make this possible, a prototype of the original product is built. It is then presented to the customers to get feedback. It’s advisable to deploy a small demo version or a beta version of the product based on the idea. This helps in making necessary improvements in the product to get maximum customer satisfaction.
Step 4: Idea Implementation
The next step is to take the beta version from the idea development process and make a full-fledged product. This would help bring all the stakeholders on board with the idea and the upcoming innovation.
Step 5: Adoption
The final step after the successful implementation of an idea is to keep a regular check on its adoption by the organization. Collecting feedback on the solution will help keep track of the success of the initiative in accordance with its initial KPIs.
Creating and Managing Innovation Processes With the Ideas Component in Salesforce
‘Ideas’ by Salesforce helps increase the visibility of opinions by ideators in a Salesforce-powered community. It provides a transparent way for you to collect ideas and showcase innovation. However, if your Salesforce Org works on the LEX (Lightning Experience) version, there would be challenges to access the Ideas Component.
So, how can users access ideas while using LEX?
IdeasPro, a Salesforce-native, Lightning-ready product makes it feasible to use the Ideas Component on LEX. It has various features that enable creating and managing the process of an idea evolving into an innovation. Here’s a quick look into its features and how they support the innovation process:
Mapping Accounts With Ideas
IdeasPro allows mapping the user accounts with ideas they create, comment on, or like. This feature allows tracking of the creation and management of an idea in the community.
Merging Ideas
As a Salesforce-powered community has multiple users logged in, there is a high chance of multiple users posting similar ideas. To facilitate idea tracking and avoid duplicity, IdeasPro allows merging ideas under a parent idea.
Categorizing Ideas
It helps to categorize ideas that allow a systematic arrangement of data on the community.
Update Voting
Whenever an idea is posted on the community by a member, other participants can easily comment and vote on the ideas posted. This initiates a healthy discussion on the community and also provides a transparent view of the participants.
Profanity Prevention
It helps prevent profanity in the community. Users can define abusive words that they wish to be blocked. By doing so, they prevent community members from posting ideas/comments that use such words. This helps maintain integrity in the community and keeps the overall communication cordial.
Convert Emails-to-Ideas
This feature enables auto-conversion of incoming emails to ideas and saves them into the Salesforce instance. This allows effective use of time along with simplifying the process of posting ideas on the community.
Conclusion
Your employees, customers, and partners are the best sources of ideas for your business. Making them come together on a common platform to share their ideas, exchange thoughts, have discussions, and manage their valuable ideas is best facilitated with ideas management software. And IdeasPro takes it a step further. So, explore more about it, as and when you please, here.
