Innovation in business

I was watching a video where Scott Cook (One of the founders of Intuit) talked about capturing employee ideas. Where a couple of his new hires built a system called Brainstorm. It was an idea capturing portal that encouraged employee collaboration on new ideas. Scott described it as a passion marketplace.

Then I realised, I’d built an idea-capturing system in one of my last permanent roles which eventually became a company-wide product (admittedly after some politicising). It was great to see a critical mass of employees really get involved.

I also helped one of my recent clients implement a similar system using Yammer. It took a while to build up a critical mass, but the culture of the company was incredibly risk-adverse, so it wasn’t really conducive to capturing and experimenting with employee ideas.

How you actually go about changing a company’s culture, I’m not too sure. But if a company is not capturing and acting on new employee ideas, then they’re missing out on a great opportunity.