The key challenge in employee-driven innovation is to offer spaces where the diverse knowledge of the employees can come into play and foster valuable new ideas.
Where do you look for radical new ideas to further develop your business?
The fostering of new ideas in organizations has traditionally been the monopoly of a development department, where a small elite of specialists had the exclusive right to come up with new ideas.
But why not open up the front end of innovation and embrace diversity, exploit the collective intelligence of the many instead of trusting solely on the few and encourage the generalists to contribute. Currently the paradigm of open innovation is claimed to be the next big thing with involvement of external resources, e.g. users, customers and partners in the innovation process.
However, before opening up the innovation process for external resources, there may be an untapped potential that is easier to access – the internal resources. Consider the distributed knowledge among all the employees in an organisation. Then imagine all the ideas for new business development that would arise by bringing this knowledge together.
The service technician who works at the customer’s site may have valuable knowledge about unmet customer needs. The sales representative in a far away region may have knowledge about the emergence of new markets. The enthusiastic IT-supporter may have experience with new technologies still unknown to the research department.
The key challenge in employee-driven innovation is to offer spaces where the diverse knowledge of the employees can come into play and foster valuable new ideas, and to create processes that mature the best ideas to a high level before reaching top management. At worst, employee-driven innovation ends up being a time-consuming process that creates noise and disturbance in the organisation. At best, it creates a vibrant culture of innovation throughout the organisation.