by David McCann – CFO.com | US
February 10, 2010
“Motorola uses a prediction-market variant to determine which among thousands of employee-submitted ideas merit a further look.
In 2003 Motorola rolled out a system through which employees could propose ideas for products or anything else that might boost the company's value. By one measure it was an unqualified success: it produced 10,000 ideas over the next four years.
But the volume of submissions to the system, called Think Tank, overwhelmed the review boards that were set up to vet the ideas. A backlog swelled, and missed opportunities abounded. In one case, a competitor brought out a product with features that had been suggested by a Motorola employee years earlier [...]”
via Crowd Control – Business Intelligence – CFO.com.
Another insightful article by John L. Mariotti about the usefulness of ideas. This excerpt is taken from the introductory paragraph:
“There are millions of clever ideas out there. The challenge is whether there is a need for these ideas that is strong enough to cause someone to “buy them.” Just because an idea is neat, unique, clever or even useful, doesn’t mean that discriminating buyers will pay for it.”
The full article:
Inventions: Solutions in Search of Problems : Innovation :: American Express OPEN Forum.
Illustration by Lars Leetaru
A very good article by Zia Khan and Jon Katzenbach at Strategy+Business on the fact that some (bad) ideas should have been killed but actually weren’t. Take a look at this introduction:
““Why don’t we have enough good ideas? How can we tell which idea is going to be the next big thing? Why is it so hard to get an idea from the drawing board into the market?” Most telling of all is the question: “Why do we still waste resources on ideas that people don’t believe in?” In other words, even though an idea has been effectively “killed,” it still remains on the agenda, with nobody fully willing to learn from the mistake, put it to rest, and move on to other endeavors.”
Read the full article:
http://www.strategy-business.com/article/09303?pg=all
Paul Sloane writes and gives keynote talks on innovation. This is an excerpt of one of his latest articles:
“How can you measure how well your organization is doing with innovation? What metrics can you use? Most corporations find it difficult to measure innovation in any satisfactory way. But there is help at hand.”
Read the full article:
What Are the Best Metrics for Measuring Innovation? – associatedcontent.com.
This is an interesting article by Tim Kastelle on the problem ideas face in old, big, fat organizations: they just don’t spread!
The introduction:
“The fundamental point that I was trying to make in yesterday’s post is that most of us are facing the same innovation problem: it is extremely difficult to get new ideas to spread within most organisations. We are a bit deceived because we hear about innovation at Google, and 3M, and Apple, and we think that all of our organisations should work like that. Unfortunately, most of them don’t. My examples yesterday came from education, and I know that a lot of people in the public sector think that innovation is unusually hard in their organisations. But nearly everyone resists change.”
Read the full article at timkastelle.org:
http://timkastelle.org/blog/2010/02/new-ideas-in-old-systems/
