How To Encourage Workers To Suggest Innovation?

An anonymous reader writes "The software company where I work has an Innovation and Knowledge program that encourages workers to provide ideas for new products and suggestions to improve the work place, productivity or welfare. The ideas and suggestions are evaluated by a board that decides whether they should be implemented or not. The group of workers with more ideas participates in a raffle to receive a prize. I would like to know what other programs people have seen like this and how they differ. What is the best way to encourage workers to suggest new products to be made / researched by the company?"

Comments

Criticism is better

[Sigvatr]

I think first companies need to make employees feel comfortable criticizing their superiors.

Re:empowerment 20% of the time.

[morgan_greywolf]

I'm going to reply to this post backwards if you don't mind.

What motivates people is recognition.

That's one of the things. A guy named Frederick Hertzberg suggested that employees are motivated by a hierarchy of needs.

They start at the very low levels: Physical Environment, Salary, Job Security, Status, etc.

Then they proceed to higher levels. Recognition is actually the second highest motivator, and it certainly is a motivator for some. But Google is actually a good example of Hertzberg's highest motivator which is achievement: people are motivated by the work itself. Self-actualization.

Google let's their employees work on their own interesting side projects for 20% of their time. It's resulted in some of their best innovations. The employee is responsible for keeping the project up to date and Google owns it, obviously.

Google's employees get to pitch side projects and suggest them to management. IOW, they get to work on what interests them. They are motivated by the actual work. Real Google products started as side projects.

RE: Money go in or get out.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

If you are considering the "money" suggestion you should probably keep the quirks of human psychology in mind. Excluding the stone-cold-homo-economicus types(who are fairly rare in practice), most people can be motivated for almost no money, or a good deal of money; but often won't be motivated by just a little money.

A lot of people voluntarily do valuable work, or come up with valuable ideas, for essentially no money, because there is something else that hooks them. Think Free Software people, various sorts of volunteers, people who do more than they need to at work, and so on. People will also, obviously, be motivated by large amounts of money(large being a relative measure).

The middle ground, though, can be a bad idea. People think about economic and non-economic activity differently. Somebody who would submit a linux kernel patch for free might well be insulted if they were offered rentacoder rates for their work. Somebody who will voluntarily suggest a valuable process improvement just because he takes pride in his work would probably not be pleased by a toaster. This is a somewhat interesting piece on the subject.

Either you create an environment that gives people the social warm and fuzzies(this includes paying decent money; but relies on social factors) or you give people real rewards to motivate them. Nobody on a professional salary is going to innovate for condescension and peanuts. They'll innovate because the environment is good and they want to, or for real money.

Like maybe residuals and royalties

[Marxist Hacker 42]

An idea for a software program is not unlike an idea for a book, a poem, or a song. I suggest that if a company *really* wants innovation, that they offer 1% royalties that are not negated by loss of employment. That way, a good software developer may, after 10 or 30 years of coding, actually be able to retire.

Re:Like maybe residuals and royalties

[gutnor]

Nice in theory. In practice that will just become like the US patent system: you will have people submitting tons of general ideas that will prevent other employee to submit "derivative" ideas and/or could interfere with the company already ongoing projects.

Also idea as you said, idea for software program are like ideas for books, poem, ... Meaning they are very common and worthless, without huge effort.

If you want innovation - you can pay for it in another way. Just give time and resource to your employee to pursue some of their ideas. When you see something concretely good taking shape, reward your employee by upgrading his pet project into a company project and give him some career opportunity on it.

That will cost the company the same (or more), but without the side effect of the patent system.
That seems to work alright at google. ( but well google is full of cash right now, so difficult to say how beneficial is this approach in the long term in less profitable times. )