Every day, great ideas are being generated for your company by employees. Are you harnessing their power? Three experts in this area weigh in on how your company can benefit from the thinking that’s going on all around you.

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Q: Can employees really contribute that much to profits or to new ways of doing things?
Stephen Shapiro: Sustainable growth is predicated on employee contributions. Koch Industries—which owns a diverse group of energy, chemicals, financial and other companies worldwide—achieved a hundredfold growth over 38 years, compared with a thirteenfold increase in the S&P 500 over the same time period, primarily through pushing decision-making to the lowest levels of the organization. One simple example:
When Koch wanted to achieve world-class safety, rather than have a few safety engineers review every
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aspect of operations for safety improvements, they gave this responsibility to all employees. This initiative resulted in as much as a 50 percent reduction each year in the number and severity of accidents across Koch Industries.

Susan Baird: Quill just held a corporate-wide competition for generating ideas for growth. The result was five solid ideas that will generate profitable growth. The key will be to keep building on these ideas. In many cases, the best ideas come from employees who are on the job and talking to the customer every day.

Doug Hall: The greatest untapped resource in corporations are the logical and rational people—engineers, manufacturing, finance and even legal. They probably attend half as many brainstorming sessions, yet in my experience they are twice as likely to invent feasible and profitable ideas as the creative visionaries.
 
Q. What steps can organizations take to encourage and help their employees come up with new ideas?
  • Anticipate your customers’ future needs. Companies that do so are many times more likely to succeed than companies that wait for customers to ask for solutions.
  • Invest in your intellectual capital machine. The only way to ignite fresh thoughts is to fill people’s brains with fresh stimuli and insights, give them new problems to solve or work to solve old problems in new ways. Do this, and you’ll see exciting results.
  • Finally, create a “patent culture.” That is the fastest and easiest way to get your people focused on uniqueness. Ideas that are unique are much more likely to produce profit. Patents are also tangible and not easy to get, so they are a great way to measure success.
Stephen Shapiro: Making employees accountable is critical. This forces employees to be creative to find new solutions. For example, Mölnlycke Health Care, one of Europe’s leading manufacturers and suppliers of single-use medical products, allowed production teams to decide how to best meet their goals. With this responsibility moved to the individuals on those teams, nearly 70 percent of the company’s new products now launch on time, compared with just 15 percent previously. As a result, the company quadrupled its shareholder value in only five years.
Susan Baird: Through our innovation forum, Quill employees can submit ideas, and they can also use our web site as a resource for innovation. We hold an annual, corporate-wide contest to generate ideas for growth as part of our annual Leadership Awards program. Associates nominate those who demonstrate key qualities of the award, such as innovative behaviors, traits and talents. We also hold monthly Lunch and Learns on creativity, brainstorming techniques and innovation.
 
Q. How can a company measure whether its steps to foster increased creativity are working?
Susan Baird: We have identified strategic initiatives within each area of the business as part of larger innovation initiatives. “Stretch goals” are set for these initiatives, and the results are reported at monthly meetings. If the goal is not met, action items and next-steps are identified and communicated to the team.
Doug Hall: Count your provisional patents. When you have a culture of invention, people are continuously searching for new ideas. Patents are today’s currency and your best shot at a monopoly. Also, look into your future: Are you excited about upcoming offerings? If the future looks empty, then you know that is a problem, because you won’t have new ideas to develop. Lastly, measure your progress. How many new ideas are being generated? How many new patents? We’ve found measurement leads to learning, and learning leads to changes and growth.
Stephen Shapiro: The answer is the value of implemented ideas: Ideas that are developed from start to finish can typically be measured in terms of how much they cost to implement versus the value the company received through new sales or savings. Then you can see the real impact on business results.
 
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