Unlocking Novelty: How Organizations Can Select Novel Ideas

You may insist, as much as you want, that “the ideas are a dime a dozen,” but if you ever laid a hand on a real corporate innovation project, you would know that every NPD process starts with an idea, a quality novel idea.

That means that your troubles, as a corporate innovator, start almost immediately: after generating a lot of ideas, either through internal brainstorming or crowdsourcing, you now must select and nurture this “quality novel idea,” the one that will drive your NPD process to a successful launch.

So, how do you go about that, while dealing with the sheer volume of “raw” ideas and trying at the same time to avoid biases that are intrinsic to any selection process?

If you want academic science to help you, I have two news: bad and good. The bad news is that researchers still struggle with identifying novelty. The good news, though, is that they’re working on that.

A recent issue of the Organization: Innovation & Management magazine is dedicated to the topic of novelty. I strongly recommend you look it up and read at least an introductory article by Deichmann, Cattani, and Ferriani. Below, I’m summarizing four articles from the issue that I found the most interesting from a practitioner’s point of view. ???

The perils of biases and feedback

Heiman and Hurmelinna-Laukkanen remind us that your idea selection process can go wrong even before you assemble a stable of potential winners; you can derail it when formulating the problem you want to solve.

Heiman and Hurmelinna-Laukkanen show that different biases can impair the formulation of strategic problems, steering organizations toward suboptimal solutions. Of various biases, two have the most pronounced negative effect on problem formulation: cognitive (e.g., familiarity and confirmation biases) and motivational (the one manifesting as the influence of personal desires and emotions).

Interestingly, the study demonstrates that awareness of cognitive bias can mitigate its intensity; however, motivational bias remains resistant to awareness alone, indicating the need for deeper organizational or cultural interventions.

Beyond detection, the journey of an idea within an organization is heavily influenced by the feedback. Chen, Magnusson, and Bj?rk investigate how feedback affects idea selection in internal crowdsourcing environments. Their research shows that positive feedback boosts idea acceptance, while negative feedback, although potentially detrimental to selection, can drive valuable revisions that improve idea quality.

It's here that biases may kick in again as feedback delivered by managers often signals to the rest of the evaluators that an idea is ready for selection, whether this is true or not. By encouraging diverse input, including from experts, organizations can therefore enhance the legitimacy of ideas, ultimately leading to more robust innovations.

AI to the rescue

Now, that we know that AI/LLM tools can successfully generate novel ideas, it’s only logical to expect them to become involved in idea evaluation. That’s the topic covered by ?Just, Str?hle, Füller, and Hutter. The authors explore the use of language models like SBERT, Doc2Vec, and GPT-3, to automate novelty detection among the pool of crowdsourced ideas.

By measuring semantic distance from existing reference sets, they show the effectiveness of AI in flagging novel ideas, with SBERT outperforming other models in aligning with human assessments.

Interestingly, the study highlights that AI is particularly effective in evaluating ideas that are shorter in description and when comparing these ideas to existing product categories rather than to other crowdsourced ideas. A word of caution: AI often overestimates the novelty of ideas that are conceptually less innovative but uniquely structured, reinforcing the need for a hybrid approach that blends AI with human intuition.

Perfecting your pitch: “how” vs. “why”

Even the most innovative ideas require effective communication to secure buy-in. Falchetti, Cattani, and Ferriani analyze the impact of framing strategies on the reception of novel ideas. They show that radical, disruptive ideas are best pitched with concrete "how" framing that clarifies their practical application and mitigates uncertainty. In contrast, incremental ideas that build on existing concepts benefit from abstract "why" framing, aligning with audience expectations.

A mismatch between the novelty of an idea and its framing can hinder its attractiveness, suggesting that innovators, both entrepreneurs and corporate innovators, must carefully tailor their pitches to the nature of the idea when seeking to maximize its appeal to investors and decision-makers.

Lessons learned

As organizations continue to navigate the complexities of the innovation process, they should address the issue of detecting and selecting the most promising novel ideas. Four approaches—dealing with biases in problem formulation, fostering unbiased feedback, leveraging AI for novelty detection, and aligning communication strategies with the nature of ideas—will provide corporate innovators with a good place to start optimizing the process.

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