By Ron Shulkin

Maybe this rings a bell for you: You want to launch an innovation program at your company but you can’t get any support.

I talk all day to people who are interested in innovation. They know in their hearts that embracing innovation is the only way their organizations will flourish. They know the only way their company can compete in the difficult economic climate we face is to adopt an innovative approach. These people I talk to fall in love with the idea of collaborative ideation; assembling all of their smart people while they share ideas and other information of interest. They yearn to allow their cohort to find others within the company who are like minded; with common areas of interest.

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By Peter Verschuere

I’ve always been determined not to lose my creative side, because it's my belief that innovation cannot persist without creativity. If you loose your creativity, you stop to be innovative.

Yesterday I've been watching Josh Linkner's keynote on creativity, and I'd like to share it with you because it induces positive vibes and contains some strong and valuable messages:

• Never cave to your detractors.
• Sometimes you have to let go in order to seize greatness.
• Aim for the future.
• Pursue the unconventional path.
• Put passion first! (the money will follow).

Josh Linkner is the New York Times Bestselling author of "Disciplined Dreaming: A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity".
Josh is the CEO and Managing Partner of Detroit Venture Partners. Together with business partners Earvin "Magic" Johnson and NBA team owner Dan Gilbert, Josh is actively rebuilding urban areas through technology and entrepreneurship. Josh is also Adjunct Professor of Applied Creativity at the University of Michigan.

But most importantly, Josh is on a mission to make the world more creative.

Peter Verschuere is Social Media Director at CogniStreamer®, an Open Innovation Management System. Learn more about CogniStreamer®, follow our tweets or join us on Facebook. 

By Ron Shulkin

If you’re about to spend your 2011 on a decision to buy an idea management system, here’s some last minute due diligence questions to ask your software vendor (and yourself) before putting yourself out there with a risk. Enterprise software decisions are always a risk. The good news is that a successful decision can bolster a career.

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By Ron Shulkin

You may not know it yet, but you want an idea management social network in your organization. If you don’t have one, you may only get an electronic suggestion box, which is really no better than a static list of ideas. And that’s not going to do anyone any good.

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Some collected thoughts on why innovation matters, now more than ever.

• Innovation generates high-value, better jobs.
• Innovation fuels wealth creation and profitability.
• Innovation creates new industries and markets. It spurs productivity and economic growth.
  I don’t know of a company or a country that has prospered and grown over the long term that has not also been an innovation leader.  The company that builds a culture of innovation is on the path to growth. The company that fails to innovate will eventually disappear.
• Innovation raises the quality of life.
  We face enormous challenges today - as individual companies and institutions, but also as nations, as societies, and as a planet. I believe most if not all of these challenges can be highly responsive to innovation. We’re not innovating boldly enough in as many areas I think we could and should be doing.
• Innovation goes beyond invention.

Judy Estrin is an American business executive. She is currently the CEO of JLabs, through which she pursues a broad range of advisory activities including sitting on corporate and advisory boards and speaking engagements.
In this video clip, she states that we've become too shortsighted and more risk averse when it comes to developing new technology, and that this cultural shift away from innovative breeding grounds is to our own long-term disadvantage. 

Peter Verschuere is Team Coordinator at CogniStreamer®, an Open Innovation Management System. Learn more about CogniStreamer®, follow our tweets or join us on Facebook. 

By Peter Verschuere

Creativity is the ability to imagine or invent something new by combining, changing, or reapplying existing ideas. 

It is therefore essential that being creative is encouraged in an organization that aims on growth. It is essential to turn creativity into a common attitude within your company where change and newness are accepted, where there's a willingness to play with ideas and possibilities, a flexibility of outlook, the habit of enjoying the good, while looking for ways to improve it.

In this video, Jim Carroll criticizes the negative attitude that sometimes lives in a company, and stresses the need for taking risks in order to get ahead.

Peter Verschuere is Team Coordinator at CogniStreamer®, an Open Innovation Management System. Learn more about CogniStreamer®, follow our tweets or join us on Facebook. 

By Peter Verschuere

In these economically difficult times, being innovative is a necessity for any organization in order to survive and optimize their growth. However, employees often prefer a status quo or controlable changes because they know how everything operates currently, and they don't want to potentially jeopardise their positions.
The fear associated with being creative or resourceful is usually devastating to an enterprise. 

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By Peter Verschuere

Our clients don't worry about not getting enough ideas. When you deploy CogniStreamer at your company your problem might be too many ideas!

Fortunately our social science algorithms will help you promote the best ideas automatically taking into account which ideas were voted on, discussed, viewed the most, and so on.

This infographic illustrates in 10 steps how the principle of the Wisdom of Crowds can boost an idea.

Peter Verschuere is Team Coordinator at CogniStreamer®, an Open Innovation Management System. Learn more about CogniStreamer®, follow our tweets or join us on Facebook. 

By Peter Verschuere

At CogniStreamer we strongly believe in innovation through collaboration. Our core values are the paradigm of open innovation and the principle of "the wisdom of crowds." Last week I ran into this video clip where Derek Powazek explains the 4 elements that create wise crowds: Diversity, Independance, Decentralization and Aggregation. Because these four items are a perfect match with our CogniStreamer view on crowdsourcing, I couldn't resist to share this clip with you.

Derek Powazek helps companies develop strategies to engage their audience, enable user-created content systems that actually create great experiences, and generally avoid the problems that so often strike when companies meet communities. He's the author of "Design for Community: The Art of Connecting Real People in virtual Places".

Peter Verschuere is Team Coordinator at CogniStreamer®, an Open Innovation Management System. Learn more about CogniStreamer®, follow our tweets or join us on Facebook. 

by Peter Verschuere

Being part of the CogniStreamer® Development Team, my main experience with Innovation & Idea Management topics is from a practical point of view. "How can we improve the user experience when discussing an idea?" "Is it always necessary to collect ideas starting from a challenge (or seed, or campaign...)? And how do we handle unsolicited ideas?"

Recently I focused on this one:
Should the participating crowd be rewarded for their contributions? Some say this is absolutely necessary - others state that introducing a reward system or showing a leader board discourages or impedes people. The main goal of this post is to find out what's the best way to attract as many contributors as possible to a challenge and how to make sure these contributors (and more, new people) keep coming back to help solving even more challenges. 

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