Innovation labs

Adding Related Content

Members can add documents and links that relate to an Innovation Lab (e.g., research).

Click add a link or upload file

To post link:

1. Click on Add a Link. Add a link dialog pops up.
2. Enter the URL, description, and notes.
3. Click Save to post the link.

Use this dialog to add a link

To upload file:

1. Click on Upload File. Upload file dialog pops up prompting for file.
2. Click on Browse. A file chooser is opened.
3. Choose file and click OK on Upload file dialog.

Use this dialog to upload file

Here is what the Related Content area looks like in an Innovation Lab.

There will be entries in the stream to reflect these actions (as well others described below).

Communicating in the Innovation Lab

The lab has it’s own stream which is ideal for communication within once the Lab has been set up, supporting ideas have been associated with it, a team of Experts and Sponsors has been assembled, related documents and links are uploaded, the real work of the lab can begin.

The community features of the Lab are ideal for supporting contextual conversations that analyze the options and propose different ways of implementing them.

Experts and Sponsors has a special icon to indicate their role making them more visible in the stream (not shown below).

Assessing Ideas

Before proposing projects to fully flesh-out an idea or group of ideas, innovation facilitators would like experts to do a high-level vetting of the ideas against a configurable and weighted set of criteria.

To specify these criteria, do the following:

1. Click on Manage Idea Criteria under See All Members. A panel is displayed where the idea assessment criteria can be specified.



Click Manage Idea Criteria

2. Click on Add new criterion.



3. Enter the criteria. Each criteria has a name, a type and a weight. Initially there will be two criteria types: rating and number. The sum of the criteria (times the weight) comprises the score of the idea.

Once the criteria (at least one) are defined, sort options display in the Related Ideas area. There is one sort link for each criteria and one for overall points. A points box appears on each related idea as well as an Evaluate link.

Clicking on Evaluate presents an area for the expert to input the assessment data as seen below.

The expert can then click on the appropriate star for the rating-based criteria and enter a number of the value for the number-based criteria and then click Save.

Once the data is entered the points are calculated. This idea is worth 1910 points which comes from:

• 1000 points for carbon footprint reduction: 100 tons carbon foot print saving times a weight of 10
• -100 points for Savings: -10,000 savings (this is a cost, obviously) times a weight of 10
• 10 points for Revenue: $1K revenue increase times a weight of 10
• 1000 points for Feasibility: full five stars (10 points per half star) times a weight of 100

This idea is worth 1910 points

In the 4.5.2 version, we introduced the ability for one or more experts to evaluate each Idea in the Related Ideas list.

If more than one expert evaluates an Idea, the total points for the individual criteria as well as the total overall points for the Idea will be averaged by the total number of evaluations.

Once an expert creates their own evaluation, the individual evaluations of the other experts is visible.

To review the evaluations by overall points and the various criteria, click on the appropriate filter.

By Footprint:

By Footprint

By Points

Project Proposals within an Innovation Lab

Now that ideas have been assessed, those worthy of implementation need to be proposed as projects.

Project proposals in their various phases can be viewed in the projects area on the main lab page. Launched Projects are projects that have passed the various internal business case gates and have had project communities created to support the execution process. Proposed Projects are still being analyzed and evaluated, and have an initial status of “Under Review”.

Projects that get reviewed and are considered not viable are marked accordingly.

A sample list of project proposals at various stages

Clicking on a Project Proposal (like “Develop and Implement an Energy Scorecard”), let’s you see more data about it and allows you to comment. The other actions available depends on your role.

Here is an example of a launched project (clicking on from the lab takes you here):