National Ideas Day a big hit

The National Ideas Day, held on November 19th 2009 at www.evd.nl and organised by René Blok, Burton Drenthem Soesman and Ger Mastenbroek has become a great success. More than 100 delegates from all over The Netherlands attended this conference. It was a great platform for Innovation, Creativity and especially Ideamanagement.

George Penders opened the conference, member of the board of EVD. His speech contained a brief overview managing of ideas at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and about EVD IDEA.Loek Goede of the National Ideacenter introduced Bernie Sander, the Canadian Ideamanagement Guru and the Keynote Speaker. His ideo generation methodology, called Pit Stop, is a great success story and provided an amazing atmosphere at the conference.
Ger Mastenbroek of the National Ideacenter then introduced the nominees for the Creativity Award 2009. The nominees:

The overall winner was:
Anne Heeroma Watercompany Groningen
His idea saved more than 135.000 euro's and the implementation helps the environment.
For his achievement he received the Bronze Egg and a lot of publicity.

More information can be found at www.ideeencentrum.nl and take a shot at the Creativity price 2010…..you will never know…..
Ideamanagement is life…, the rest details

Idea Management as a Business Strategy

Organizations that succeed in today's competitive environment share a common secret - their management practices ensure the involvement of all individuals in their organizations. For organizations to be truly successful they must provide vehicles to engage their people and to tap their creativity and innovation.

The misuse, abuse or non-use of employee ideas is one of the last barriers of the industrial and information age. This kind of behaviour - or lack thereof - does damage to the bottom line. It kills the one thing organizations need most - new ideas. So here is both a question and a call to action, dear readers: What old paradigms, practices and behaviours do our organizations, and we, need to get rid of in order to unleash and maximize the potential of employee creativity and innovation in the workplace?

Historically charged
Employee suggestion programs have been historically charged with this important role in organizations. They have been around for over 100 years and have flourished throughout Europe and North America. They have continued to redefine themselves from the old days of the suggestion box … essentially a coffin where ideas from employees went to die … to modern-day decentralized processes where front-line managers are the gate-keeper’s of their employee’s ideas. But suggestion systems, however they are defined and operationalized, no longer provide the sole conduit for employee ideas.
Continuous improvement processes, Kaizen and Lean, to name just a few engagement vehicles, have challenged current idea management thinking.

Lean techniques
The application of Lean techniques improve the flow of ideas and are critical to continued growth:
- focus improvement efforts on key themes
- top down and bottom up strategies for success
- problem solving with trained local facilitators
- increased corporate support for implementation
- alignment of values, goals, people and process.
The 3 elements of work are as below:
1. Value Added Activities that transform or shape material or information, are wanted by the customer and are done right the first time
2. (Required) Non Value Added Activities that result in no value but which cannot be eliminated based on existing technology, equipment or thinking ie regulatory, customer mandated, legal … the target should be to minimize these
3. Waste … Non Value Added Activities that consume resources but create no value in the eyes of the customer … the target should be to eliminate these If you cannot get rid of it, it turns to required, non value added!
And it is not just the classical production areas where non value activites abound. Some facts from the administrative arena:
- 70% of the reasons for customer complaints comes from administrative processes;
- 30% of working time is occupied by meetings which are often inefficiently organized;
- 13% of the daily working time, on average, is required for “searching”.

Lean = Kaizen!
Lean processes mean the systematic identification and elimination of all non value adding activities by all employees (National Institute of Standard Technologies). Framed simply: Efficiency = doing things right. Effectiveness = doing the right things. Efficiency is completing a task successfully and without wasting time. Our employees know where these opportunities lie and can tell us. After all, the expert is the person doing the job daily. Organizations that know how to harness these hidden reserves in these difficult financial times help themselves become ‘fit’ again. They also have a better chance to come out of this crisis strengthened. Waste has no future!

Bernie Sander, President, IT Innovation Transfer Inc,www.innovationtransfer.com, bsander@innovationtransfer.com
© IT Innovation Transfer Inc. 2009

Bernie Sander is an international consultant, author and workshop leader. He lives in Ottawa, Canada and travels the world working with Fortune 500 organizations. He has international expertise in suggestion system design and implementation, continuous improvement processes, group facilitation and problem solving, strategic planning, recognition architectures and idea management processes. He is President of his own consulting firm, Innovation Transfer, serves on the education faculty of several international organizations and is author of the books, ‘A Wake-Up Call for Idea Champions’, ‘On Idea Management’ and ‘PiT-Stop – Problem Finding and Problem Solving in Teams’, all best practice thinking in the field of managing employee ideas. Bernie served as a past President of the North American Employee Involvement Association and speaks at many international conferences annually.