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Idea Management Systems in principle are about gathering ideas but also about judging their value and identifying their characteristics in relation to the organisation. In the following page we discuss a lightweight model for classifying ideas and a methodology in which those characteristics can be automatically transformed into metrics that aid idea assessment and knowledge management in Idea Management Systems.

1. Introduction
Usually the Idea Assessment phase gets down to providing ratings for predefined metrics and filling evaluation forms by moderator or designated staff with expert knowledge.

Although ideas supplied with such assessment data can be analysed from many angles and filtered out quite well, the problem is that the assessment process requires a lot of effort in terms of both time consumption and human resources allocation.

In Gi2MO project, we have been working on a universal taxonomy for annotation of ideas that would require less expert knowledge and would derive more from idea text rather than specialistic market, product and organisation knowledge. We identify the presented taxonomy as a supplementary tool to currently existing idea metrics and assessment processes.

The main principle and difference of our approach is that ideas are being only classified as opposed to rated. The annotator fulfils the role of judging the facts related to the idea rather than assessing the value of ideas.

This simplification allows to facilitate faster manual annotation and adds to possibility for automatic annotation of ideas with their characteristics because in many cases the annotations can can be inferred from idea text.

2. Idea Characteristics Taxonomy

The taxonomy proposed by us is composed out of four main pillars:

• idea trigger
• innovation description
• proposal type
• described object

The point of the taxonomy is to define a number of terms which can be applied as idea annotations either manually by idea reviewers or automatically using annotation algorithms.

For a full list of all taxonomy terms and an explanation of each please refer to the Gi2MO Types taxonomy specification. Additionally, if you would like to use Gi2MO Types together with our open-source Idea Management System, please see a how-to posted on our blog.

3. Deriving Idea Metrics from Characteristics

While idea characteristics can be a useful way to quickly identify a single idea, it is still quite difficult to analyze many ideas in huge instances with thousands of users. In order to ease the idea comparison we designed metrics that can be automatically generated based on with characteristic annotations that an idea has or doesn’t have.

In addition, the same metrics can be calculated for idea subsets (for example Idea Contests) or for entire Idea Management Systems. The summarized statistics can deliver information on the behavior of the community and tell the idea contest managers how innovators react to new contests.