Tips for Managing Ideas like Other Company Assets

You wouldn’t let an employee leave the company with their laptop or PDA, so why allow them to go without having collected critical IP – ideas they conceived while employed thinking about how to make your company’s products better.

Here are five tips for better management of your idea assets:

1. Don’t think of it as a point-in-time activity. Your employees are always thinking, so they need an “always on” environment for sharing their ideas with others.
2. Plan to DO something with employee ideas. Even a simple communication back that an idea has been reviewed will keep employees motivated to continue sharing. Updates throughout an idea review cycle are even better.
3. Facilitate collaboration across departments and regions. Innovative thinking grows exponentially when employees are exposed to different ways of looking at a problem.
4. Let your employees do the screening. There are lots of ideas out there – business and product owners won’t be able to review them all. Let employees evaluate each other’s ideas to make the process more efficient.
5. Remember that timing is a critical factor. Sometimes the right idea for today was conceived months or even years earlier. Perhaps by an employee who’s no longer with the company.

See the Forest for the Trees

Innovative ideas are being exchanged by employees daily in meetings, over email and at lunch. Often good ideas never make it beyond the “email string.” When you have a bird’s eye view of the ideas employees are talking about, you can begin to see the trends and spot the opportunities that can make a real difference in your products – opportunities that might otherwise appear as just another tree.

If you’re losing staff during this economic downturn, you’re not just losing productivity; you’re losing intellectual property that could be used to help your company excel during the recovery.

Employee Attrition = Lost IP

In most companies, the wealth of innovative ideas that exists in the minds of employees is a tremendously valuable asset. When employees leave the company, their product and service ideas leave with them. Their files and emails might be mined for information “as needed,” but without the employee there to share AND promote their ideas, this IP is essentially lost.

If you think you can capture their ideas while they’re on their way out, think again. For most employees, ideas occur “in the moment,” so if capturing employee ideas is not a regular part of your corporate culture, you could be losing valuable IP that could have a positive impact on products, sales, customer satisfaction and, ultimately, revenue.

Employees leave companies for many reasons, including the economy, industry trends or a changing company culture. Engaging your employees in idea sharing and collaboration not only ensures that “tribal knowledge” is preserved; it raises employee satisfaction by giving everyone a voice in the discussion on how to improve products and services.

In my next post later this week, I’ll offer five tips for managing your idea assets.