Businesses innovate. But not all innovations make it past the brainstorming stage. Enhancing this process requires integrating tools like innovation management software to effectively capture and develop innovative ideas.
Ideas get selected for many reasons unique to your business. You need an organized way to capture, evaluate, and select ideas for further development and patenting. In this article, you will learn how you can use Triangle IP’s TIP Tool™ to shortlist and select promising ideas.
Capturing and Collaborating on Ideas From Across Your Enterprise
Innovators capture their ideas with the TIP Tool™ by describing the concept. Its simple and straightforward idea submission form makes it easy for employees across the enterprise, not just the R&D team, to contribute ideas. The form captures essential information without requiring inventors to fill in numerous fields or provide lengthy explanations. They can also upload supporting documents, that reviewers can later use to understand and evaluate the ideas. Enterprises can customize the form if they need to collect additional information upfront.
Effective idea capture strategies are crucial for ensuring these initial concepts are accurately and comprehensively recorded. This step could take some effort and work before the innovator publishes it.
Publication releases the idea to the other people listed on the idea. These people may include co-inventors and managers. These co-workers collaborate through the TIP Tool™ to refine the description by adding, editing, and deleting information pertaining to the idea.
Once this step gets completed, a manager can move the idea from capture and collaboration to vetting.
Evaluating Ideas Based on Your Enterprise’s Unique Criteria
The vetting stage involves several steps an enterprise uses to narrow down its innovations. Every enterprise has a different way of vetting ideas based on its business priorities and budget.
For budgetary reasons alone, your enterprise must decide whether an innovation is worth sending to a patent attorney for drafting. Having clear evaluation criteria can make this decision easier.
Triangle IP’s free Idea Evaluation Matrix helps you evaluate ideas based on factors such as market value, relevance to your core business, commercialization plans, observability, patentability likelihood, and enforceability. Each factor has a weightage that contributes to a total score out of 100. You can adjust the weightages based on what matters most to your enterprise.
Additionally, in the TIP Tool™, inventors can also give their ideas an initial Value Score and Patentability Score when submitting an idea. These are two important considerations when evaluating an invention. The Value Score reflects its potential value to the business, while the Patentability Score reflects its perceived chances of getting patent protection.
But these initial scores are not enough for vetting ideas. Enterprises also need to gather comments from the people involved in an idea and consider their inputs before deciding what to pursue. So these scores can be further adjusted based on that discussion.
In really small enterprises, one person often knows everything. This person understands the technical aspects of the company’s innovations, its strategic vision, and its budget. This one person can decide what to pursue.
In larger enterprises, however, there may be several decision-makers. Some might not have the technical background to appreciate the subtleties and significance of an innovation. To shortlist and select ideas for patent drafting, you need input from people who understand the innovation and its value to the enterprise.
Sorting Promising Ideas by Bringing in Other Voices to the Table
Larger enterprises need to involve multiple people in the vetting process. This team could include:
- The innovators
- The leaders
- The decision makers
The innovators come to the table with a description of how the innovation works and the value proposition of investing the company’s resources in it. They can also speak to how much it’s going to cost to implement and how likely it is to end up in the product.
The company’s leadership brings the strategic vision. The innovators may have a wonderful innovation, but in a part of the business that is not important. Or maybe the idea is something that the enterprise doesn’t want to invest in.
The leadership can help the decision makers understand the difference between the core business and ideas that spin off the core business. Based on this information, the decision makers can identify those areas that don’t have a lot of support within the enterprise so they can focus on getting patents on innovations the company cares about.
The decision makers must synthesize this information so they can pick the innovations that provide both technical benefits and fit the enterprise’s strategic vision. You might have the ability to get a great patent, it has no value to the business if it’s not strategic.
The people who are deciding are looking at many factors including:
- Strategic vision
- Technical benefits
- Budget
- Patent coverage within the business’s area
This last point can be an important consideration. The enterprise’s patent attorney can give you advice about whether your competitors are filing a lot or not.
The TIP Tool™ Facilitates the Vetting Process
This explanation of a reasoned approach to vetting illustrates that there is no one-size-fits-all process. Instead, you need the ability to collaborate in real-time with everyone who can provide valuable input into the decision.
This is where the TIP Tool™ facilitates the vetting process. In a live or online meeting, everyone involved can pull up the TIP Tool™. Everybody can comment in real-time and people can see each other’s comments. You can edit the summary together. The entire team can change the value of a particular idea. This happens in real-time and everyone involved in the collaboration can see it happen.
One of the benefits of this approach is efficiency. Everyone involved in the vetting process can work together to quickly capture the best thinking within your enterprise. But more importantly, your team will select innovations that are both worthy of spending budget on and align with your strategic vision.
To learn more about the TIP Tool™ and how it can help you identify promising ideas for patenting, sign up for a free trial or book an exclusive demo with the founder himself.
