I have been humbled by the feedback that I have received on my book, Intrapreneurship: Managing Ideas within Your Organization. While all readers have provided me with interesting insights on how ideas are managed within their organization, a handful have gone further, asking me some (difficult) questions. I will tackle an easy question in this blog post – “Can you give me a few simple rules that I can use to get better at managing ideas?”  Variants of this question were posed by several readers who could relate to the frustrations employees face when it comes to leveraging their ideas. Little over a year back, I was invited tokeynote a Center of Excellence for Biosensors, Instrumentation, and Process Control meetingheld at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. My talk, Ten Rules of Leveraging Ideas for Innovation, will serve as the foundation for my five simple rules.
In this blog post, I will focus on the employee perspective; in a future post, I will share five elements that managers should pay attention to...
To read more, please click here - link

Desouza, K.C., and Paquette, S. Knowledge Management: An Introduction, New York, NY: Neal-Schuman Publishers, Inc., 2011.

• UK Edition: Knowledge Management: An Introduction, London, United Kingdom: Facet Publishing, 2011.

• Build and lead a knowledge management program given the business strategy, goals and objectives of your organization.
• Design a knowledge management program that leads to sustainable business value.
• Identify, manage, and leverage valuable knowledge as intellectual assets.
• Identify and choose among various technology options for managing knowledge.
• Manage the grayness of the workforce through retaining valuable knowledge within the organization.
• Engage employees through the Human Resource function of the organization in knowledge creation, sharing, and re-use.

Lawyers: Management consultants often are called in to act as lawyers. These engagements occur when an organization is need of specialized, strategic, decision-making advice. When done correctly, the consultants are called in to help an organization evaluate strategic options before they choose a major course of action. When done incorrectly, consultants are called in to help mitigate damage from actions, or even to address public relations disasters.

Engineers: One of the most popular role for management consultants is that of an ‘engineers.’ Most graduates take on this position as their first job after completion of their  studies. In this role, the consultant helps an organization to ‘build’ something, most commonly an information technology solution or a human resource process. The management consultant builds a new organizational artifact and helps an organization make it a part of its operational fabric.

Designers:  Consultants who act as designers, or architects, oversee the work of engineers who might later build something. Designers are involved in the process of architecting organizational re-designs, system integrations, and even process improvement projects. The major element that differentiates designers from engineers is that designers need to have broad knowledge about the business and industry in which the organization operates. Engineers, on the other hand, have deeper knowledge about their particular too lsets.

Doctors: There are management consultants who are called upon to work as doctors. They deal with specific organizational problems, when management knows that either 1) the organization needs a routine check-up, or 2) the organization is suffering from an ailment and needs a medication (fix) to remedy the situation. Management consultants that work as doctors have deep knowledge within specific domains and are often experts in these spaces. Doctor-like management consultants are common for issues such as employee morale boosting, global innovation team management, or assisting in managing organizational change programs.

Artists: The most eclectic of management consultants function as artists. These individuals bring innovation into an organization. They bring new ideas that the organization did not know were there and are meant to stimulate fresh thinking and reflection. Like Picasso or van Gogh, artists rarely come up with creations to meet specific needs of an organization. It is more common for organizations to recognize the value of their work and then bring their ideas into the organization. Like hanging a painting on the wall, the ideas are meant to stimulate the organization to fresh and invigorated thinking.

Coaches: Management consultants who have a track record of working with senior executives and organizational leaders are often called upon to take on the role of coach. This also happens to be my favorite role as a consultant.  In this role, the coach serves as a confidant and mentor to an executive. Executives use their coach to help them improve their skills (from building effective business plans to creating effective teams).  In turn, the coach puts executives through a series of "exercises" to train them on how to become effective leaders.

How do you feel about this classification scheme? Have I missed any other types of consultants? What kind of management consultant do you want to be and why?

On November 10^th, I will give a keynote presentation for the annual conference hosted by the Center of Excellence for Biosensors, Instrumentation and Process Control (COBIK) at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. The conference is titled: Slovenska visokotehnološka MSP na prepihu inovativne in razvojno tehnološke prebojnosti: Slovenija x.0 ?

The Slovenian government has supported the development of Centers of Excellence. Each Center of Excellence focuses on creating efficient relationships between public and private research institutions, technology driven firms and their global market positioning. The Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana, is one of the partners in the Center of Excellence (COBIK) and is responsible for enabling the research and technology driven firms to gain business knowledge and helping them in the process to market their innovative products and solutions.

The program is available here [LINK]

Ten Rules of Leveraging Ideas for Innovation [LINK]

In this keynote address, I will discuss how leading organizations are building robust processes for leveraging ideas within their organization and across their networks. Ideas are critical ingredients for innovation. Designing robust innovation processes calls for great care in the handling of ideas. To this end, leading organizations are designing, and deploying, a portfolio of mechanisms to help their employees seek out, share, experiment with, commercialize, diffuse, and implement, ideas. I will highlight emerging technology solutions. In addition, I will outline how smart organizations are capturing knowledge about their innovation process and employing it for continuous refinement and renewal.

I will be giving a talk at Bangkok University (Kluaynamthai Campus) on designing organizational innovation processes. The talk is organized by Institute for Knowledge and Innovation South-East Asia (IKI-SEA) as part of their KM World Seminar Series and will take place on October 28, 2010 from 1.30 PM to 4:00 PM. Please click here to download the flyer.