Hey! You’re Stealing My Idea – Part II

A client’s story

Read Part I of our story.

In this part of the story, we’ll share a bit around what’s going wrong and how it might be corrected for future innovation meetings.
The premise behind monthly innovation meetings is a good one! Provide a forum for employees from throughout the organization to get together and discuss ideas on how to improve the business. The goal was that while one employee may have a great idea, if he shared that idea with others, it could be built upon and executed within the company. However, the problem was that the organization forgot that sometimes people are a little possessive about their ideas. There are a number of things the organization could have done in order to reduce the issues they were seeing. I worked closely with the client to “reset” the monthly innovation meetings with processes that would help to better stage the meetings and enable for collaboration. We started with a description of the monthly innovation meetings as follows:

Monthly innovation meetings will be held on the 2nd Wednesday of every month at noon. All employees are welcome to attend. Pizza and sodas will be provided. This forum is to share ideas on how to improve any aspect of the business. This may include processes, product development, customer engagement, training of employees or any other area of the business overall. Ideas will be shared and built upon by all attendees. The goal of these monthly innovation meetings is to share your idea with others and let the group continue to build on the idea presented.

We also shared the following as the process around these monthly innovation meetings:

• All ideas presented are the ownership of the organization; however, credit will be given to the originator of the idea.
• Ideas presented at the monthly innovation meetings will be reviewed by attendees of the meeting and built upon to further refine them.
• Once ideas have been further refined and built upon, they will be presented to the leadership team. The originator of the idea will make the presentation at a leadership meeting.
• Should an idea be selected for further review, the originator of the idea will be provided leave time from his/her job for a period of 3 months to continue to formulate the idea.
• After 3 months, the idea will be evaluated again by the leadership team and if chosen to continue, the originator of the idea will be provided a team to implement the idea.

A 15 minutes webinar was developed for all participants in monthly innovation meetings (and it was required that they review the webinar prior to participation in the session) that focused on sharing best practices around innovation and creative thinking, including:

• Enabling for improving upon an idea by allowing for the perspectives and insight that comes from diversity – individuals with a variety of different backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, etc.
• Reviewing the processes in place for these meetings and asking the individual to confirm agreement.

We re-launched the monthly innovation meetings. The individual who didn’t want to share ideas opted out of participating, which was OK; we expected we would have a few “opt outs” and the meeting was certainly not mandatory. Many others commented that they had a better understanding of the purpose of the meeting and the company found that participation increased.

As of last month, over 30 individuals regularly participated in the monthly sessions and the organization already had 2 ideas that looked promising!