Hutch Carpenter's Public Library

If this is true for you…consider for a moment just the money you are losing from the cost-cutting ideas your employees would share with you. Annual surveys of employee suggestion programs consistently report that the annual savings from ideas submitted in active suggestion programs average from over $700 to more than $1,000 per employee per year.

Suggestion Program Means Savings

This means a typical employer with 50 employees and an active suggestion program can save over $35,000 a year from ideas submitted by employees. Most of these ideas generate savings year-after-year. So the cumulative value of ideas over time is substantially greater than the $35,000.

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cost-cutting ideas employees savings roi

According to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers, almost half (45%) of lucrative ideas--whether breakthrough products or services, new uses for old ones, or ways to cut costs--come from employees. (Customers, suppliers, and competitors contribute the other half.)

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employees innovation management ideas brainstorming

Today, the Japan Railways (JR) East, the largest rail carrier in the world, continues to benefit from listening to their employees. For example, this rail carrier was cutting tunnels through Mount Tanigawa for a new bullet-train route. They hit water that caused problems for the construction efforts. The engineers developed plans to drain the water away. Construction crews started drinking the water and sharing how good the water tasted. A maintenance worker submitted a suggestion that the organization start bottling and marketing the water as premium mineral water.

His idea was accepted and the water now appears on the market under the brand name Oshimizu. The rail carrier has now installed vending machines in every one of its thousand stations and their advertisements emphasize the purity of the water that percolates through the snow-capped mountains picking up healthful amounts of minerals. The JR East Rail Company water is so popular that they now have entered the home delivery service of the water. Water sales recently exceeded $47M (Robinson & Stern, 1998). The idea came from a maintenance crew worker.

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ideas innovation managament japan bottled water employees

I was a corporate innovator and, for me, it always started with a question. “Why are we manually entering all that information from system A into system B?” or “Why are we running this entire multi-billion business on a spreadsheet?” I wasn’t the only person to notice these things– what made me an “innovator” was that I was willing to arm wrestle the organization until I landed the solution. But this is not a foundation for a successful business execution culture. Companies need a way to nurture and develop the ideas that have legs. Spigit has figured out integrating game mechanics into social networking can help companies like AT&T, MedPlus and Pfizer lower the innovation barrier and create a garden of innovation, instead of a wresting match.

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spigit innovation management

I will say, however, that there were also a fair number of submissions that might have been good, but never made it past the first cut. One of the most common questions I hear is why wasn’t my session chosen?, so while the 691 are all fresh in my mind, and inspired by Jeremiah Owyang’s post on How to moderate a panel, here’s my best advice when making a speaking submission.

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conferences speaking panels proposals

Series of drawings, depicting different ways ideas suffer internally.

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innovation management ideas

Actually failure to all four stages is why I often make the observation that innovation programmes with their own large budgets usually fail. They don’t have to go through the rigour before they get to spend money, so invariably they spend money on the wrong things. Consequently, they also fail to get predictable in their returns quickly enough. Usually, at least in banking, you have 18 months to do that before your programme is killed off.

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innovation management lean banking

Empirical studies of innovation have found that end users frequently develop important product and process innovations. Defying conventional wisdom on the negative effects of uncompensated spillovers, innovative users also often openly reveal their innovations to competing users and to manufacturers. Rival users are thus in a position to reproduce the innovation in-house and benefit from using it, and manufacturers are in a position to refine the innovation and sell it to all users, including competitors of the user revealing its innovation. In this paper we explore the incentives that users might have to freely reveal their proprietary innovations. We then develop a game-theoretic model to explore the effect of these incentives on users’ decisions to reveal or hide their proprietary information. We find that, under realistic parameter constellations, free revealing pays. We conclude by discussing some implications of our findings.

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innovation open enterprise20

URL shortening services are experiencing a renaissance in the age of Twitter. When every character counts, these services reduce long URLs to tiny forms. But which is the best to use, when so many are offered and new ones seem to appear each day? Below, issues to consider and a breakdown of popular services, including recommendations and services to avoid (the new DiggBar being one of these).

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seo url shorteners

Entrepreneurs make fast decisions and move forward knowing that at best 70% of their decisions are going to be right. They move the ball forward every day. They are quick to spot their mistakes and correct. Good entrepreneurs can admit when their course of action was wrong and learn from it. Good entrepreneurs are wrong often. If you’re not then you’re not trying hard enough. Good entrepreneurs have a penchant for doing vs. over-analyzing. (obviously don’t read this as zero analysis)

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entrepreneurship product management startup

Small business is in contrast often like a single campus community, hopefully rapidly growing and feeding off its surroundings. The commonality is broadband internet connectivity, which like the transport options connecting small campus to large city makes all sorts of interesting collaboration possible.

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smb enterprise20 collaboration

Instead of keeping these snowboard routines hidden from judges until the Olympics, he's actually been showcasing them to judges (and, by extension, to competitors). The reason? If judges see the snowboard tricks in action without knowing more about their technical difficulty, they are more likely to mark them lower

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olympics snowboarding innovation management

So starting from goals I’ve highlighted 4 activities: collaboration (coordinating and working together with a common set of results in mind and building on top of the partial outputs of others), connection (putting in place active or inactive relationships between individuals based on common interests, passions or issues), communication & sharing (to support informal, asynchronous, loosely coupled knowledge exchanges making experts and expertise bubbling up), collective intelligence (aggregating and filtering the wisdom of crowds on the border of our company to innovate and predict future trends). Activies are not mutually exclusive and many users are exposed to many of them at the same time.

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enterprise20 adoption collaboration collective intelligence

Just as the federal government is using online brainstorming with government employees and the public to generate ideas for saving money or going green, state and local governments are also using new technology to tap people’s intelligence and expertise. The City of Manor, Texas (pop. 5800) has launched “Manor Labs,” an innovation marketplace for improving city services. A participant can sign up to suggest “ideas and solutions” for the police department, the municipal court, and everything in between. Each participant’s suggestion is ranked and rewarded with “innobucks.” These points can be redeemed for prizes: a million points wins “mayor for the day” while 400,000 points can be traded for a ride-along with the Chief of Police.

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manor whitehouse gov20 spigit opengov

Read about Manor Labs http://www.manorlabs.org/ - @whitehouse Beth Noveck's new fave example of crowdsourcing #w2e #gov20 #opengov

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spigit gov20 whitehouse opengov web20

Here are the questions VCs asked Redfin that changed how we think about our business.

1. What’s your deadly sin?
Sequoia’s Roelof Botha said he only invests in companies that let consumers indulge in one of the seven deadly sins. He rattled them off with alarming familiarity. “You don’t want to be the site that people should use,” Roelof said. “You want to be the site they can’t stop using.”

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sins social ego software enterprise20

We then did some advanced brainstorming using SCAMPER and ‘What if….?’ methods. It worked well. The extrovert group were lively and active with plenty of strong personalities and good ideas. The introvert group was a little quieter but came up with ideas that were at least as good and possibly more radical than the extroverts. In the analysis and feedback session the introverts said that they preferred the arrangement because they were not dominated by noisy extroverts. So it was an interesting experiment that seemed to work.

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brainstorming extroverts introverts innovation ideas

Salesforce Chatter - Real-Time Collaboration with Content, Apps and People

Social computing and social networks have provided consumers with a new way to gain insights into what's happening in the world, when things are taking place and the people they know. Yet enterprise collaboration is almost non-existent because content, apps and people are disconnected and not part of the same conversation. With Salesforce Chatter, companies will be smarter as content, apps and people join the real-time conversation through a secure, private social network within the enterprise.

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salesforce enterprise20 collaboration

I think along with wikis and blogs as standalone tools, we are going to see our workflow tools incorporate wiki and blog features, but yet it won’t be a blog or a wiki. We will have “post it” buttons on forms that publish fragments from our workflow to other places, yet we don’t have a blog in our workflow, it’s just a form, kind of like an edge feed like publi.sh.

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enterprise20 wikis blogs enterprise software collaboration

Everyone talks about the need for innovation these days, but they especially talk about why businesses are so bad at it. Procter & Gamble recently reduced the washing power of Tide, labeled the new version "Basic," and trumpeted it as an innovation. If that's the best we can do, no wonder there's such concern. A recent report from the Doblin Group claims that 96% of innovation resources are focused on incremental improvements. The best-selling book Blue Ocean Strategy claims that only 14% of innovations are "radical," and that those few radical innovations produce 61% of profits.

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