About Michael Shrivathsan

I'm your author, Michael Shrivathsan. I've worked at several innovative companies in Silicon Valley, USA over the past two decades - and helped innovate 5 market-leading products. I'm also a USPTO patent recipient. For my day job, I'm the VP of Product Management at Accompa - we make IdeaGlow, a cloud based idea management software.

7 Benefits of an Employee Suggestion Program

June 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment

A well-designed employee suggestion program can offer several benefits to your organization.

Here are some of the top benefits you can reap via employee suggestion programs…

Benefits of Employee Suggestion Programs

  1. Improve Employee Morale
    A well-designed employee suggestion program enables employees to improve their own work processes. This improves employee morale.
  2. Increase Job Satisfaction
    Participating in employee suggestion programs increases employee job satisfaction as employees feel they are positively influencing their organization.
    [Read more...]
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What is an “Innovation Engine”?

June 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Hi there – I’m making this is post to define a term we will be using quite a bit in our future posts & articles.

The term is:

Innovation Engine

Let us define this term now…

Definition: Innovation Engine

In a couple of previous posts – I outlined why we should approach innovation as a process, and how to start building your innovation process.

As discussed in the second post linked above, a good innovation management process takes raw materials (ideas) and converts them to desired output (innovative products & services). Here’s a diagram that depicts this:

[Read more...]

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The First Step in Building Your Innovation Management Process

May 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In a previous post, I shared my view that “innovation management process” is not an oxymoron – and that innovation can indeed be managed as a process.

In fact, I believe innovation must be managed as a process – not as random Eureka moments. Research shows this is how “built to last” companies such as GE and P&G approach innovation.

Ok, that settles that! The next question is:

How do you start implementing an innovation process at your organization?

I’ll share my thoughts on this question today.

[Read more...]

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Idea Management & Radical Innovation

May 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In a previous post, I outlined 3 types of innovation. As shown in the image below, they are: Incremental innovation, Semi-radical innovation, and Radical innovation.

Types of Innovation

One question that often comes up is:

Can Idea Management really lead to “Radical” innovation?

This is a very good question. Here are my thoughts on this.

[Read more...]

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8 Idea Management Software Tools

April 12, 2012 By 1 Comment

In my previous post, I provided a definition of idea management systems – and outlined a list of features that idea management systems have. We also looked at a couple of popular idea management systems in action.

In this post, I will provide a list of commercial idea management software tools you can buy – to build an idea management system at your organization. There are a large number of idea management tools available for purchase, but my post will focus only on tools from proven companies… [Read more...]

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