Idea Management in a Digital World: An Adapted Framework

Abstract

The continuing emergence of new digital technologies, platforms and infrastructure has opened unprecedented possibilities for innovation. Eager to seize these opportunities, many organizations adopt idea management programs to help leverage their employees’ ideas for digital innovations. However, we lack an integrated understanding of how the logics of digital innovation affect the practice of idea management. We therefore pose the following research question: “How can idea management programs be conceptualized in light of digital innovation?”. Drawing on the disparate yet complementary conceptual building blocks of open innovation and problem-solution pairs, we develop a revised conceptualization of how idea management is practiced in a digital context. Our framework suggests that idea management programs can be used by organizations as orchestration and cognitive sensemaking devices to support the matching, forking, merging and refinement of ideas. These insights shed fresh light on how innovations form and evolve in a pervasively digital world.