Ron Shulkin, VP of the Americas at CogniStreamer, recently wrote a blog post titled "Trust me: You do NOT want to go through your company's idea list manually." Shulkin makes the case against using a basic electronic idea box for ideation, or shoehorning ideas into existing tools, instead of an application dedicated to managing ideas.

"Without a proper mechanism for automatic idea promotion, someone is going to end up with a thousand ideas on their desk and have to filter them manually," Shulkin writes. "They'll have to read them all, sort through them, put them into categories, combine similar ones, somehow score them, rank them and decide which ones are the best." The result is that the person in charge of filtering through all these ideas won't be able to do a very good job, good ideas won't be implemented and people will be discouraged from submitting ideas.

How do you gather ideas at work? Are you using an idea management platform, dropping ideas into a box, or dealing with it all through e-mail or a forum?