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According to Dan Pink (lawyer, speech writer, author, and career analyst), the way to get the best original ideas out of people is to cut back on restrictions and rules regarding output, and stop offering incentives for work produced. This may sound a little backwards, but science has shown that sometimes when we offer rewards for output or production, it effects the quality of the ideas or work as opposed to offering no incentive.

In his TED Global 2009 talk last month, Pink said, “There is a disconnect between what science knows and what business does.” And he adds, “Traditional notions of management work great if you want compliance, but if you want engagement, self-direction works best.”

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I don’t think that anymore. Having spent more time studying companies like Toyota I have realized that high quality (the goal of Six Sigma) is a great platform for new ideas (the goal of design thinking). Similarly, as Chuck Jones implies, Six Sigma can help new ideas get better faster. Having been involved in several first mover products at IDEO I can attest to the fact that very rarely is that first iteration the best possible product in terms of quality or functionality.

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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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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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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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Series of drawings, depicting different ways ideas suffer internally.

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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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There's really no shortage of creativity or of creative people in business institutions. Brainstorming sessions are, indeed, exciting, liberating and valuable.

Almost anybody can produce good ideas in an encouraging environment. The scarce people are those who have the experience, know-how and staying power to assemble, organize and coordinate all the elements required to produce innovation.

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Failure, Johansson maintains, seems a necessary element in eventual innovative success. Not even the most creative geniuses succeed on their first and every effort, and an environment intended to encourage innovation should be prepared to reward creative failure as a necessary cost. He admits that rewarding failure is not an easy practice to explain to a manager and offers an explanation and some tactical suggestions. In fact, he cites a couple of studies that suggest that offering explicit Skinnerian rewards for success may dampen creativity. Other behaviors he sees as contributing to successful creativity include breaking away from the network of associates and ties that link one to directional pursuits, taking risks, and confronting fear — especially the fear of failure.

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During its first year (1951) there were 789 suggestions and awards totaling $2638. Both the quantity and quality of the suggestions were rather low. One reason apparently was that the employees thought “creative ideas” must be something like “big inventions”. Consequently, Shoichi Saito, father of the creative idea suggestion system, started emphasizing quantity and efforts were made to increase the number of suggestions.

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There's a new way to give the City of Manor suggestions for improvement, but it's not by putting a slip of paper into a box.

Last week, city officials launched an innovative version of the suggestion box. Manor Labs is the city's user-driven research-and-development division located online at manorlabs.org, where city staff members, residents — anyone — can submit ideas and solutions for the city's betterment.

Those suggestions can be tracked, reviewed, rated, commented on and even changed by other participants.

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Some of the brightest engineers and designers I've worked with were absolute failures at explaining their ideas to others. In working with them it seems they were trained to focus on their brilliance and the things they made - everything else was no their problem. This is the "designer as artist" view of the world which is still surprisingly popular in design, and engineering, programs.

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Existing theories on the influence of social networks on creativity focus on idea generation. Conversely, the new product development literature concentrates more on the selection of ideas and projects. In this paper we bridge this gap by developing a dynamic framework for the role of social networks from idea generation to selection. We apply findings from creativity and behavioral decision-making literature and present an in-depth understanding of the sociological processes in the front-end of the new product development process. Our framework builds on the importance of mutual understanding, sense making and consensus formation. The propositions focus on both network structure and content and highlight the need to have strong ties and prior related knowledge, to incorporate decision makers, and to move over time from a large, non-redundant and heterogeneous to a smaller and more cohesive network structure. We conclude with a discussion on empirical validation of the framework and possible extensions.

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Companies undertaking an innovation progression strategy, should build their approach around the strategy and the objectives its designed to achieve. I definitely see parallels to the process vs. software issues common to CRM during its early stages.

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Many employees say they don’t speak up to their boss because of fear of repercussions. But are workers just being paranoid? Burris’ research says no.

In a working paper titled “The risks and rewards of speaking up: Responses to employee voice,” Burris conducted three experiments and one field study to examine how people view dissenting opinion from employees.

“I found that employees who speak up and challenge the status quo are viewed as less competent, less dedicated to the organization and more threatening compared to those who support the way things are,” Burris says. “They are also rated as worse performers, and their ideas get less support.”

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have you had a look at spigit? We used it to create a world-first ideas mgmt system internally that runs like a stock market...

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Last fall we launched Project 10^100, a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible. Your response was overwhelming. Thousands of people from more than 170 countries submitted more than 150,000 (or around 10^5.2) ideas, from general investment suggestions to specific implementation proposals. As we reviewed these submissions, we started noticing lots of similar ideas related to certain broad topics, and decided that combining the best aspects of these individual proposals would produce the most innovative approaches to solving some very pressing problems.

The result is the list you see below of 16 "big ideas," each inspired by numerous individual submissions. Which ones should we make happen? You tell us. Your vote for one of these ideas will help our advisory board choose up to 5 projects to fund, at which point we'll launch an RFP process to identify the organization(s) that are best suited to implementing them.

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google ideas innovation management

"The software company where I work has an Innovation and Knowledge program that encourages workers to provide ideas for new products and suggestions to improve the work place, productivity or welfare. The ideas and suggestions are evaluated by a board that decides whether they should be implemented or not. The group of workers with more ideas participates in a raffle to receive a prize. I would like to know what other programs people have seen like this and how they differ. What is the best way to encourage workers to suggest new products to be made / researched by the company?"

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His logic is this: Assume you want a solution for a problem. If you get suggestions from two people, it’s run of the mill. If you have 50 people doing it, you are more likely to find a solution.

So, how does he get those large numbers (his is a 6,000-people company) to voluntarily come out with solutions? It was a challenge. “We realised that everyone has an idea but most such ideas are killed by the person him/herself. ‘What if my boss thinks it’s trivial?’ is enough to destroy an idea that is germinating.”

Typically, ideas are not freely encouraged in companies, and if you make a suggestion the management asks you to “give a proposal in format, talk about costs and the earlier experience of doing this...” If a person has to make an effort to sell an idea then that kills the idea, is Gopalan’s take.

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After studying hundreds of inventive thinkers, from Charles Darwin to Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs, he concluded that the quickest and most reliable path to invention is paved with appropriated ideas. That may not strike you as terribly original, but Murray's method involves mixing and matching the concepts of others, ideally from disparate fields, to arrive at something new.

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