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

Alcohol

[Reality Master 201]

They'll also suggest a whole bunch of other, probably not so helpful stuff.

Ownership interest

[HBI]

That was easy.

Re:Ownership interest

[DrLang21]

A company I used to work for was really into Kaizan. They did profit sharing, and a metric in deciding how much was received in profit sharing was Kaizan participation. It resulted in a lot of dull ideas, but the shear mass of input resulted in a number of good ideas on a pretty regular basis.

Re:Ownership interest

[stephanruby]

For any idea they use they'll pay you 10% of the money saved, capped at $1 million. This is actually fairly common, and most plants have a history of large payouts.

Ideas are cheap. What you need to pay for is the idea *and* the drive to get it implemented. And where it comes to implementation, you need to reward the entire group/team, not just the individual, otherwise people will be working on ideas in isolation from each other, and your colleagues will be more interested in shooting down your ideas than helping you with them.

Just imagine our k-12 educational system, the children with ideas get rewarded by the teachers, but they have to work in isolation from each other, and often their classmates won't help them -- their classmates will ignore them, or even worse ostracize them, for trying so hard. Now compare this to a team sport for instance, like American football, when a student helps win a trophy for his team/his school, the entire school benefits, but everyone on that team/school knows who is, or who are, the individual(s) of the team that helped get the school that trophy, so that/those individual(s) get rewarded by increased personal prestige and increased social status (at least, within the microcosm of that school).

In Japan, this is essentially how Edward Demings taught it, and this is essentially how the Japanese have implemented it. Toyota workers do not get rewarded individually. The team gets rewarded first, then whoever came up with the idea gets recognized as the super-star (at least, within his team/group). Now this does not mean that competition doesn't play an important role in there either, it indeed does, but that competition and that recognition is often promoted between the teams and between the groups, and never between individual members of the same team.

Define innovation

[Gribflex]

I think it's important to define what you are looking for.
At my company, we had a very similar project for a long time. I always thought innovation meant some incredible break through, or new product line. Turns out, some innovations that were accepted were changes to our coffee vendor, and tests for our new development folk (standard practice in my office, but considered innovative at one of our other sites.)

Had I know what the quality bar was at the beginning of the project, I would have submitted all kinds of stuff. As it was, I was just waiting for a really great idea.

Re:Prizes and Royalties

[DragonFodder]

Agree with that, at the very least the idea of a raffle for a prize pretty much sucks. So I come up with an idea that could save the company thousands, or even millions of dollars. and, I get a toaster oven. nice incentive.

Make it a percentage of the cost savings as a lump bonus and you'll not only get more suggestions, you'll get onces that actually have some thought and implementation plans put into them.

Human Resource Management is where the money is

[unlametheweak]

How To Encourage Workers To Suggest Innovation?

1) Pay "workers" for each suggestion.
2) Ensure that each "worker" is made aware that the "worker" owns the ideas he submits to the company, and that the company will offer to license the ideas from the "worker" if Management deems the ideas "good enough" to implement
3) Ensure that the following are NOT offered as incentives: "raffles", "prizes" and (like one company I worked for offered, the "opportunity" to win the privilege of having breakfast with a Manager). This should be common sense for ANYBODY who has studied Management, the Social Sciences, Psychology, etc. But unfortunately the type of people who get into Human Resource Management don't usually have the brightest light bulbs.

Give credit where credit is due

[RogueWarrior65]

Take cues from George Westinghouse instead of Thomas Edison. Edison screwed over Tesla who then took his genius to Westinghouse who then won the war of the currents.

Re:empowerment 20% of the time.

[Grishnakh]

At my current employer, all we get is the slap on the back. Because of the bad economy, there's no chance for a raise or bonus, but they've sent us all an email asking us to please continue working hard and coming up with innovative ideas. Yeah, right.

Any innovative ideas I come up will be kept hidden until I'm out of here.