Exploring Large Collections of Ideas in Collaborative Settings through Visualization

As innovation becomes more and more important companies increasingly turn to their customers, suppliers, and other external actors to collect ideas for new products and services. Following such an open innovation approach organizations have launched online innovation communities where users collaboratively generate and refine ideas. These communities can generate large amounts of ideas in relatively short time periods. For example, the Starbucks innovation community mystarbucksidea.com contains over 88,000 ideas after just two years. To harness the value created through this collaboration and make resulting data usable for later stages of the innovation process we developed a visualization to explore large pools of user-generated ideas. We empirically collected requirements through expert interviews with innovation managers which we then translated into a concrete implementation of a Web-based visualization tool. The visualization serves two purposes. First, it offers a way to explore large idea pools resulting from collaborative idea generation activities. Second, it can be used to generate new input to further develop ideas through collaboration, e.g., by combining similar ideas.