Innovative Project Idea Maturation: An Important Part of Governance

Project Governance includes the elicitation of ideas for projects, choosing the best ideas, initiating projects, assigning resources, and nurturing the projects to success. In the third largest bank in Denmark – Jyske Bank – IT project managers often became uncertain when they were assigned new projects; their descriptions were either to vague or broad or sometimes even both. There was a need for better project scoping and improved idea descriptions. In this paper we describe how we committed ourselves to solve this problem. Based on a literature study on innovation and using an existing creative space (room) called the "land of opportunity", we used a design science approach to formulate a new idea maturation concept. Here two years later, we have developed and evaluated our concept on several project ideas. The uncertain project managers are now very enthusiastic; they really feel that they have a much clearer scope and idea description as well as an early prototype of the idea. After four design iterations, the concept stabilized. In this paper we present the idea maturation concept and the organizational design science research process we have used.