How to Make Sure Good Ideas Don’t Get Lost in the Shuffle

Encouraging creativity can backfire if employees lack the resources, support, or mechanisms to develop and implement their ideas. Indeed, when managers urge employees to invest extra effort in creativity, but then reject their ideas (often because they are single-mindedly focused on productivity and efficiency), employees become frustrated and their creativity wanes over time. As a result, innovation can stall. But one company has devised a system that unleashes employee creativity. Unlike traditional suggestion systems, this system is a holistic process for managing the full life cycle of creativity, designed to ensure that ideas don’t get lost and that employee motivation to offer ideas is encouraged, not dampened.