Ideas Are The Lifeblood Of Business. Capture Every Fleeting Idea And Drive For Change – Richard Branson
Organizations are constantly searching for new approaches and ways to enhance new product launches, address business challenges and reduce production costs. Businesses are looking out to solve complex business challenges by involving employees with complementary skills, experiences, and mindsets. They are providing a channel to co-create and brainstorm on different perspectives for multiple solutions.
Bringing innovation to a core of a business culture improves employee engagement and brings better solutions to a business challenge.
However, generating innovative ideas for development that lead to success don’t just happen, it requires a collective push by organizations to encourage employees to adept innovative culture and get ideas.
So how does an organization supports innovation in the workplace to capture ideas from employees?
Here Are 6 Effective Ways to Capture Ideas From Employees
Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by seeking contributions from a group of employees in an organization.
Crowdsourcing encourages active participation of employees which is a cinch to pool up ideas within the organization. This practice provides a better way to obtain ideas, content, and services from employees who are directly related to or are interested in organizational business growth.
IT’S NOT ABOUT IDEAS. IT’S ABOUT MAKING IDEAS HAPPEN – SCOTT BELSKY
By implementing this, organizations can ensure a diversified way of collecting solutions to business challenges with the help of employees. This revolutionary practice will improve business by speeding up workflow processes, getting employees involved and transforming the way your business works.
Crowdsourcing requires time to capture effective ideas in an organization, but the results obtained can provide innovative, high-quality ideas and solutions for any business challenge.
Create Innovative Work Culture Strategy
Technological change and industry disruption seem to be accelerating. Organizations which build a culture of innovation are on the path to growth. Organizational culture is highly influenced by innovative and effective employees. Change won’t happen overnight – it takes time to build an innovation-driven culture across an entire organization.
Innovation culture promotes creative thinking and enables employees to think beyond the regular difficulties of their work and come up with new and unique strategies to solve them better.
“94% of senior executives agree that people and corporate culture are the most important drivers of innovation.” – PwC
Look for employees who understand the organizational vision, align with the workplace culture and work together to help the organization run smoothly. Hire employees who are fast learners, passionate, innovative and excited to work for product development and are concerned about organization growth.
Ambitious, forward-thinking employees prefer working alongside similarly driven employees, in order to achieve bigger business goals for the organization. Grouping employees with different thoughts, intense capabilities and experience, brings a diverse set of ideas and problem-solving techniques to the table.
Employees can feed off each other by exploring, testing and refining ideas within the group which helps organizations pull and capture new ideas on products and services.
Invest Work Time In Creative Thoughts
Employees who are forced to abide by rules tend to find their innovative ability throttled. Limiting freedom diminished creativity and does not allow the employee to think outside the box for solutions.
EVERYTHING BEGINS WITH AN IDEA – EARL NIGHTINGALE
The essence of innovation is achieved when management is able to pave a way to implement innovation in the organization that leads to a creative workforce. Addressing the importance of creativity in specific ways helps generate ideas from the employees.
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wrote in their 2004 IPO letter that “We encourage our employees, in addition to their regular projects, to spend 20% of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google”.
Google allows its employers to dedicate 20% of their time to personal projects. Employees are not forced to work on supplementary projects and there are no written policies about it. Usually, employees who have an idea not related to their job will focus 5-10% of their time on a personal project until they demonstrate the impact of the idea. This initiative has generated some of Google’s most successful products including Gmail, AdSense and GoogleTalk.
Organizations can dedicate a day to motivate employees and experiment with new ideas. Conducting frequent workshops to brainstorm new ideas for upcoming projects can encourage employees to get involved in ideating. Employees should allocate time for new ideas to emerge and be provided autonomy to implement new products.
Introduce An Idea Management Software Tool
In today’s competitive world, it is necessary for organizations to come up with innovative solutions to accelerate growth. The best way is to capture ideas from employees. Organizations should ensure that the creative energies of their employees are focused on innovative ideas that can be implemented to solve current business challenges.
MarketsandMarkets Research predicts that the Innovation Management market is projected to grow from an estimated USD 421.6 Million in 2017 to USD 1,519.2 Million by 2022, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 29.2% during 2017–2022.
With Idea Management Software, organizations can obtain ideas for existing business challenges and capture fresh ideas. It provides an innovation platform for employees to ideate and collaborate towards business transformation and maintain transparent and robust innovation management workflow processes.
Employees working in the organization are the ones who bring up innovative ideas. Idea management software can collect ideas from employees in all divisions.
Idea management software help organizations capture ideas, promote greater transparency, quickly capitalize and evaluate ideas quickly.
Have you discovered novel and unusual approaches to solving complex business challenges? Try an idea management tool to create a pool of unique ideas today.
Rewards And Recognition For Innovation
In our bottom-line world, we tend to focus on end results and not realize the effort involved in simply trying. The best way to keep employees continue to post their ideas is to reward their effort.
Developing and maintaining incentive-based rewards and recognition system is key to continue capturing ideas and boosting organizational growth.
Recognizing and rewarding in the organization’s newsletter, social platform, news dashboards or in employee meetings goes a long way in encouraging employees to voice their suggestions.
Leverage Your Intranet
Ideas and solutions come from employees in an organization. When employees collaborate and engage with each other, new ideas and solutions arise which can be captured by the organization for productive growth.
Collaboration occurs on many platforms, but in an intranet platform, it is more effective. Using social intranet tools like sharing, liking and commenting enable other employees to engage, collaborate and share their experiences.
Celebrating the success of the organization encourages other employees to share innovative ideas and show that ideas truly can come from anywhere.
Using the intranet as an ideation platform also provides enables organizations to stay ahead of the competition.
Mesh is a single window intranet which drives collaboration and helps capture effective ideas from employees within the organization.
Conclusion
Innovation is not a temporary fix, rather it is a long-term strategy that demands an investment of both time and effort.
An innovation culture is not just about senior level management brandishing around a few new ideas, it is about innovation that impacts the foundation of the organization and involves the participation every single employee.
Enabling employees to share innovative ideas that contribute to the overall direction of organization growth, is also increasingly important for attracting the best talent, meeting customer needs and standing out from competitors.
According to The Deloitte Millennial Survey 2017, Millennials want to work in places where they feel empowered and accountable – where they feel they can make a difference and have an impact.
As organizations seek to prioritize building an organizational culture that is innovation focused, it is important to consider implementing the right strategies to bring about the transformation from the ground up. We recommend integrating an idea management software into the digital workplace which can capture, collaborate, evaluate and select ideas that will make a difference.
If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation.
