Information Visualization to Support Idea Management

The innovation process has always been a great ally for companies. With the evolution of technology, this relationship has evolved into open innovation. As of this moment, the adoption of crowdsourcing platforms has expanded to create an effective channel between the company and its partners. In this way, it is possible to collect and unite ideas from different people who contribute to innovation. Still, collecting a large volume of data without the support of technological tools can directly affect the ability to innovate. Therefore, this work aims to create a method using visual techniques capable of improving the analysis and consequently the management of ideas. For that, usage scenarios were developed from two different bases, one of ideas and the other of scientific articles. For each scenario, groups of similar ideas used different selection criteria, thus allowing the creation of a flow of information using different visual techniques. These techniques can extract relevant non-visual information in a conventional manner. With this information the decision maker gains new resources for managing ideas. Experts in the field of idea management have approved this method. In this research, an application was made available to demonstrate a flow of visual representations in different scenarios. As a form of evaluation, a questionnaire was sent with a series of questions of usability of the method. To validate the reliability of the questionnaire sent to the specialists, Cronbach alpha coefficient formula was applied, resulting in a value of 0.825, a considerable value suitable for the coefficient. In this way, the method was able to show its importance in the scope of idea management.