Factors affecting idea development

February 11, 2019

By Sara Hägle

I’ve been working in school for over 20 years. School is a place to create ideas all day, you’re always coaching students to come up with new ideas on their own or in group. Or to develop new ways to refine ideas that have been set.

I’ve been working as a teacher, as a principal and in the management. I’ve been developping ideas at all levels systematically. But on every level you are supposed to automatically know how to manage idea management, you never get the tools of how to help others or yourself to create ideas.

In this post I will be writing about factors affecting idea management on all levels. At least in school and at the management of school.

1 First and foremost the participants of the group need to feel confident, they need to develop trust in the group. The culture of the group need to be big-hearted and open-minded. The participants need to be allowing to one another. They all need to say yes to and confirm each others and the athmosphere must be allowing considering how people are creating ideas, if they need to talk and think at the same time or if they need to think first before formulating their ideas. Every participant need to reflect on how he or she is contributing to the group and the group needs to reflect on how the group is responding to every single individual in the group.

2 Another thing is how to communicate. Who is influential? Why is that? What is okey to say or not? How is power expressed?

3 The group needs to be aware of the context. They need to zoom out to see whether there are conflicts on a large scale.

4 The leadership of the group may be a factor to consider. Sometimes there are unwanted unformal leaders guiding the idea management into wrong direction.

What do you think? Are there other factors affecting the success of good idea management?

2 responses to “Factors affecting idea development

  1. I love this post Sara! It sounds like we are on the same page on the need for innovation in the school system. I think the 4th point is critical. I think another factor affecting the success of good idea management is the finances. There seems to be a natural block to certain ideas just on the basis that it would be financially impossible, a dream. I’d love to hear your thoughts on my post too.

  2. Hej! Very interesting reflections on factors that affect the idea generation process! I agree, there are a number of factors that one need to consider when facilitating idea generation activities. I, myself, do quite a bit of research into co-design, which is an approach that enables ‘non-designers’ to become creative and collaboratively develop ideas. I found that key elements of co-design include team bonding (we often have people in groups who never collaborated before with each other) and team faciliation (it is all about enabling teams not leading them). Facilitation can be particularly challlenging when users are involved who typically do not see themselves as suitable candidates for co-design (e.g., marginalized or vulnerable consumer groups). In this article, I explore and discusse intra-team processes and the affect of faciliation in depth: https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/JOSM-10-2016-0283

Comments are closed.