For more than 5 years Innovatika has been helping companies to implement modern idea management programs. Research proves that such solutions have a real influence on a company’s innovativeness as well as on improving processes and increasing income from new products.
Nowadays companies all over the world do everything they can to effectively use their employees’ knowledge and ideas. In Poland systematic idea management is still a new concept. In November 2009 Innovatika invited practitioners who run such programs in the biggest Polish companies to share their experiences and good practices in this area. After self-evaluating their systems, the companies who took part in the study met on a dedicated workshop where they shared their experiences, barriers and tips on how to cope with difficulties.
The research has shown that most companies don’t measure direct profits or savings generated by an idea management program. However, the companies which do have visible results. In one of the companies average annual savings due to successful idea implementation in 2007-2009 amounted to PLN 578 000.
As the research has shown programs vary considerably in their scale – every year from just a few to as many as a few thousand ideas are collected. Such a big gap in results depends on the degree to which employees are engaged, the effectiveness of the tool itself and internal communication. Although usually the respondents found it hard to engage more than 10% of the employees in submitting ideas, some companies managed to involve almost a third of their team.
The most commonly suggested ideas concern improvements to processes. As research shows, there are also programs which generate ideas for products and services. The biggest challenge that is faced by the companies who have idea management programs is to improve the quality of ideas and increase the number of the employees involved.
Innovatika’s experience shows an evolution in the approach to idea management: from an open box concept where employees freely propose their ideas to the campaign approach which makes it possible to collect employees’ ideas on specific challenges defined by the management. A questionnaire in the latter approach is individually adjusted to every campaign, so that the people who submit ideas take into account the context of a problem. Another major trend in idea management has been to open up not only to employees’ ideas, but also to those of customers, lead users, suppliers and partners. Examples of such companies as P&G, Pfizer or Polish BZWBK clearly show that such an approach can be extremely useful.
For the companies which are only starting to consider implementing an idea management program, Innovatika has prepared a free report, based on the results of the research, with valuable advice given by experienced practitioners.
Free report to download here.
