Creating a culture of ideation

Creating a culture of ideation

Ideation seeds innovation. Your fertile culture of ideation will depend on a formal commitment from every level of your organization to embrace ideation. Commitment can start as a business unit strategy, C-Suite directive, or HR initiative, but it can't end there. You must have buy-in beyond lip service from all levels. How? One of the best ways is to use a culture-of-ideation checklist.

Now this checklist should include five things:

Number one, how?

Are you offering your employees training on how to generate ideas and the mindset for generating ideas?

Number two, when?

Do you have a specific time set aside for ideation? This could be a monthly ideation session, a quarterly contest, or for your technical teams, seasonal hackathons. Companies 3M and Google set aside time for employees to experiment with new ideas. Although these have traditionally operated on more of an ad-hoc basis, these 15-20% times have generated ideas resulting in huge products, such as Gmail, AdSense, and Post-it Notes.

Number three, where?

Do your employees know where to contribute ideas? This can be as simple as a monitored physical suggestion box, dedicated email inbox, or an idea hub on the company intranet. Transparency is key, meaning ideally everyone should be able to see who's contributing ideas and what ideas are being contributed. For example, transparency can take the form of weekly or monthly internal online newsletters.

Number four, why?

Why is an idea good? Provide training and a method for evaluating ideas. Even if evaluation becomes the job of an ideation steering committee made up of different people from different departments and job functions, everyone on your team should be trained to evaluate ideas, especially their own ideas.

Number five, reward.

What's your transparent method for rewarding ideas? This should include recognition for the quantity and quality of ideas shared, quality of idea communication, and quality of idea evaluation. Ideation should also be reflected in the review and promotion processes. Work with your team to customize the checklist provided or create your own checklist, and you'll be well on your way toward creating your culture of ideation.