Fostering employee innovation: leveraging your “ground level” creative capital

Abstract

Fostering employee innovationFaced with dire economic circumstances plaguing the current competitive landscape, organizations are under more pressure that ever to innovate if they wish to survive. Contrary to some opinions, it is not always the members of the corporate research and development department or members of top management teams who are the innovative geniuses of an organization. On the contrary, it is just as likely that ideas originate with employees located closer to the bottom of the organizational pyramid; the ''front-line troops'' who, directly impacted by the problem and intimately familiar with concomitant dynamics, are coming up with creative solutions, and then applying those solutions to resolve problems or pursue opportunities. The purpose of this article is to highlight the importance and value of leveraging the creative capital residing within employees to elicit collective organizational innovation.Consider the ubiquitous Post-It Notes marketed by 3-M Corporation. An employee was faced with the task of determining if there was a use for an adhesive that, while sticky, was very weak in its stickiness. Under normal circumstances this might have been a product with no obvious use, thus destined for the trash bin of failed product ideas. However, during church choir practice the 3M employee observed that choir members complained because their place markers would not stay in their hymn books. Applied to paper, the adhesive proved a perfect solution for keeping page markers in place.

Role of Strategic Thinking in Corporate Identity

“…Similarly, it is also reported that corporate identity is the result of the decisions of a very few influential internal actors of the organization and the experiences of all the stakeholders of the organization. [19] [10] Bosch, Elving and Jong mentioned that the way strategies are devised inside the organization play an important role in the consistency of the corporate identity. [15] Therefore, it is evident that apart from the methods and techniques of making strategies, their ways of execution and communication to the stakeholders also plays an important role in the built or knock of corporate identity.…”

Best practices in capturing employee creativity: forest sector firms in the USA and Finland

“…True to the accepted nature of forest sector companies and their focus on process innovation (Leavengood and Bull 2013), case companies have succeeded in capturing the creative capital and ideas that reside with production-level employees and the manufacturing processes under their care. As Self, Bandow and Schraeder (2010, p. 19) state; ‘it is only at the front lines, the factory floor, or the store floor, where employees directly interact with the product, the service, and the customer, that recognition of problems and opportunities can occur’. Therefore, organisations should value and place trust in employees and provide a supportive environment for employee participation in creating new product innovations in co-operation with customers.…”