Faster Innovation for Free

Increasing spending on R&D with top-down directives is essential for major strategic shifts and can help to increase the pace of innovation. However, if your goal is to rapidly improve existing customer experience and employee engagement, creating effective ways to collaborate with your front-line employees and see their ideas made a reality can be quicker and more cost effective.

Let’s compare. Strategic initiatives are often established through an annual planning process developed months in advance of when the actual work will happen. Employee generated ideas can be raised, discussed collaboratively and sent to the decision makers in days. The keys to success then are:

1.     Leadership Commitment

2.     Employee Engagement

3.     Rapid Implementation

Leadership Commitment. While listening to front-line employees is bottom up innovation, it still starts with the top and a commitment from leadership to (1) give people time for the program and (2) support to implement changes based on the ideas that come in. Be sure to align the types of ideas requested with the leadership commitment that you have. 

Employees Engagement. If you’re trying to crowd source good ideas for moving forward, first, you have to make it easy on people to share their ideas. Stay away from lengthy forms and calculations. Be sure that all ideas are acknowledged and appreciated personally in a way that shows you read the idea. Then, enable others to share their feedback on the idea to make it even better. Cloud-based, collaboration / ideation software exists for idea management.

Rapid Implementation. Even with the most engaging discussions, people will stop submitting ideas if they don’t see ideas being implemented. You will never implement all the ideas, but it should be at least 1 out of 20 or so. Whatever the ratio, the facilitator needs to quickly prioritize the ideas through a combination of employee feedback, data on the impact of the idea, effort to implement and expert recommendations. Even with as few as 1 out of 200 ideas submitted having a measurable impact, the program can be very valuable to the organization.

Whether you launch a company-wide ideation program or simply engage front-line employees more directly in top-down initiatives, their feedback and your acting on it will increase the pace of innovation, help your bottom line and improve employee engagement.  

Email Jim at [email protected] to continue the discussion.