Post #9 Promoting Innovation
- guyrushton9
- Nov 9, 2025
- 4 min read
Creativity is corporate survival. Involving, and recognising, people at all levels of the business in problem solving activities is key to motivating new thinking and maximising the chances of getting a great solution.
Introduction
I believe that achieving a creative, high-visibility environment leads to better ideas, improved staff engagement and retention rates, greater performance, and a stronger, more profitable, company. Building such a space is a challenge and becomes more so as the organisation grows.
It is well known that employees discount the basics of a well-run business: decent offices, good pay rates etc are important in obtaining good people and clearly differentiate from lesser organisations but they are not the reasons that people stay and grow with the company. The things that keep people, motivate them and drive the business are job satisfaction, the collective culture and professional opportunity.
The creative is often taken for granted. Job satisfaction and recognition are important to many people, but I suspect count for more in the creative and, dare I say it, geekier areas of endeavour. For engineers satisfaction comes from the ability to do a great job, to create, to innovate. It is built into their DNA. Seeing their work used and loved by customers is a big deal. Internal recognition, that leads to career opportunities and professional status is possibly even more important. These motivators are more important than just money and much more difficult to get right.
Recognition, in particular, is difficult to achieve, even more so in large, multi-site or multi-national businesses. There are many layers between the solution providers and those who notice the results. Likewise, there can be many layers that prevent innovative thinking, because change can be uncomfortable. This is where the high-visibility element of the culture needs to come in. A direct connection between the senior people who are responsible for the corporate vision, and those whose thinking could deliver it, is crucial. In the same way that customers often do not know what they really want until they start to talk about it, management are customers for ideas and potential products. They have a direction in mind but maybe something better might be easier to achieve, if the right discussion is had.
Ideation & Visibility
How do you get visibility, communication, and ideation together? While more can be done virtually these days the strongest results are still achieved by old-fashioned face to face human interaction. This personal contact promotes visibility and alerts senior management to potential within the business which would be missed by a purely virtual approach. For a large business, innovation efforts might be promoted centrally, but they will need to be implemented more locally. This is a strength since it will promote diverse approaches and experimentation; innovation in the innovation process. Successful techniques can be shared and adopted more widely.
Some methods that I have used, or helped to create, to assist in the innovation and ideation are given below. I would be very interested to have your ideas in the comments.
Internal knowledge sharing forums. These can be particularly helpful for technical questions and assistance. There are obviously data security concerns that may make them problematic.
Local 'Pitch n Put' events. Regular (monthly?) events where senior management take elevator pitches for ideas face to face with the originator. If the idea has value a small budget of time and money is allocated to a proof-of-concept project to follow it up. Extend from local, to divisional levels, for funding as the idea matures.
Themed ideation events. Specific to particular sites or product lines, structured, organised ideation sessions are held to generate new approaches to known problems. The sessions should use multiple approaches to idea generation. Properly run events like this are hard work, not a chat around a topic!
Ideation boards. It is more difficult to organise brainstorming sessions over the web but an approach based on a noticeboard might work. Start with a problem board where issues are raised. People sign up to solve them. Solvers can add to others' ideas. The solution threads can be distilled to similar concepts. Once the creation phase is complete voting on the ideas can be used to get a consensus about the best approach.
Decentralised idea/threat capture. Encourage people to keep up with the technical literature. Maintain subscriptions to academic databases and professional journals. People can then contribute to a board, or a wiki, articles with ideas about how the technology might be used or if it poses a problem for existing products. Voting can be used to get the top scorers each month, which can be reviewed further. Active participation in this sort of scheme can easily form part of everyone's KPIs, in a manner similar to HSE tickets.
Knowledge sharing events. Conferences, both virtual and physical, where people can get together, present their achievements and discuss the way forward.
Conclusions
Most of the ideas suggested above have the benefit of relying on the wisdom of large groups of people rather than individual genius. They promote the visibility of both contributors and decision makers. By encouraging these interactions better ideas, more engagement, better communication and a stronger culture might be achieved.
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