“Success is more of a bottom-up phenomenon than a top-down one.”
This is a direct quote from a recent Forbes article written by Peter Georgescu, Chairman Emeritus of Young & Rubicam and author of Capitalists Arise!, where he explores how companies can activate employee ideas and leverage their creativity using Planview IdeaPlace’s platform.
In the article, Peter makes the case for employees a critical piece to a company future success using several insights from Planview IdeaPlace, including:
- A story of a top manufacturing company whose administrative assistant solved a complex maintenance problem by watching a Tom Cruise movie.
- A comprehensive study conducted last year that revealed how companies can quantify a culture of innovation.
- AT&T investing $44 million in seed money based on ideas they generated in Planview IdeaPlace for global marketing campaigns, new service plans, and apps.
The ultimate takeaway here is that crowdsourced innovation is an invaluable tool for companies to use to future proof their businesses.
Key takeaways
Here are a few more takeaways from the article:
- Companies are seeing an increase in the number of productive innovations stemming from “lower regions” within their organizations. When employees are given a way to log their ideas, this increases conversations, debates and brainstorming – regardless if the idea is implemented or discarded in the end.
- Dylan Minor, of the Kellogg School of Management, gathered five years’ worth of data on the creativity of 3.5 million employees from 154 public companies using Planview IdeaPlace. This study revealed that innovation can be a science and that the key goal is “ideation rate”— companies with a higher rate experience faster growth and higher net income.
- There are four elements to an optimal “ideation rate”: 1) a large cross-section of participants; 2) campaigns that solicit and capture as many ideas as possible; 3) a deep bench of people evaluating, discussing and brainstorming how to act on the ideas; and 4) a sample of ideas drawn from the people “close to where the rubber meets the road”: front-line workers, floor-walkers, cashiers, and anyone who interfaces with customers directly/ works on production lines.
- Companies need to focus not just on getting more value out of the everyday employee, but rather, how they can better motivate these employees to come up with ideas and submit them.
Check out the Forbes article for more.
