INNOVATION
Nurturing Good Ideas
Jan van den Ende and Bob Kijkuit
Managers know that simply generating
lots of ideas doesn’t necessarily produce good ones. What companies need
are systems that nurture good ideas
and cull bad ones – before they ever
reach the decision maker’s desk. Our
research shows that tapping the input
of many people early in the process can
help ensure that the best ideas rise to
the top.
It’s not uncommon for companies’
idea-generation activities to produce
thousands of ideas. Reviewing all of
them to find the best is resource intensive and doesn’t guarantee high-quality
results. After all, how seriously will
reviewers consider idea number 532?
Probably it will get only superficial attention, and it will be selected for development only if its usefulness is immediately
apparent. This screening approach is
likely to leave potential blockbuster ideas
on the cutting-room floor.
Some firms, however, are taking steps
to systematically improve the quality of
ideas before they’re submitted for review. They’re encouraging employees to
first discuss ideas with their colleagues
to gain insights about their technical and
market feasibility or how they fit with
company objectives, which will either
enhance the ideas’ value or lead to their
early and appropriate demise.
Consider how this works at Unilever,
where we followed the development
of ideas at the company’s food labs in a
14-month study. Employees there usually discussed an idea with colleagues
and, based on their feedback, made
changes in the idea before submitting it.
People who tapped colleagues outside
their departments were more successful;
discussing an idea with them increased
its chances of adoption, whereas discussions with colleagues from the same department didn’t. Interestingly, communication with friends or trusted colleagues
appeared to aid adoption, probably
because their input tended to be richer
and offered more constructive and critical feedback, leading to more substantial
changes to the idea itself. What’s more,
the greater the number of perspectives
an employee got, the higher his idea’s
chances of being adopted were.
Other firms take a similar tack. At
the biotechnology research company
KeyGene, management advises employees to discuss ideas with others before
submitting them to a review committee.
In IBM’s ThinkPlace program, “catalysts”
create networks of people around ideas.
Employees post ideas on an intranet
site; catalysts select promising ones and
invite comment or support from people
in their network. Eventually, they ask one
or more network members, not necessarily the idea originator, to present the
concept to a line manager or an internal
innovation fund.
This approach to idea development offers a clear payoff in efficiency and in the
quality of ideas. But it has another benefit
as well: It enhances motivation by improving the odds of success and reducing
the chance that an employee will invest
unduly in an idea that’s likely to fail.
Jan van den Ende ( jende@rsm.nl) is a
professor of technology and innovation
management at the Rotterdam School of
Management at Erasmus University. Bob
Kijkuit ( bob.kijkuit@shell.com) is a commercial adviser at Shell Energy Europe.
Reprint F0904H
MANAGING PEOPLE
How Toxic Colleagues Corrode Performance
by Christine Porath and Christine Pearson
We’ve been studying incivility for a decade, and we’ve found that common (and
generally tolerated) antisocial behavior at work is far more toxic than managers
imagine. Berating bosses; employees who take credit for others’ work, assign
blame, or spread rumors; and coworkers who exclude teammates from networks –
all of these can cut a swath of destruction that’s often visible only to the immediate
victims. Targets of bad behavior become angry, frustrated, and even vengeful. Job
satisfaction falls, and performance plummets. Some employees leave. But those
who stay may take a bigger toll on the organization. As a senior vice president of
a Fortune 50 firm told us, “They can and do sit in the boat without pulling the oars…
and that may be worse than leaving.”
To understand the impact of incivility on performance, we polled several thou-
sand managers and employees from a diverse range of U.S. companies about their
responses to rudeness at work and learned that among those on the receiving end,
48% decreased their work effort,
47% decreased their time at work,
38% decreased their work quality,
66% said their performance declined,
80% lost work time worrying about the incident,
63% lost time avoiding the offender, and
78% said their commitment to the organization declined.
As companies slash workforces and depend on the staff left behind to do more,
they can’t afford to let a few noxious employees corrode everyone else’s performance. Uncivil behavior should be penalized and repeat offenders cut loose.
Christine Porath ( cporath@marshall.usc.edu) is an assistant professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business. Christine Pearson ( christine.pearson@thunderbird.edu) is a
professor at the Thunderbird School of Global Management. Their book, The Cost of Bad
Behavior: How Incivility Is Damaging Your Business and What to Do About It, is forthcoming from Portfolio. Reprint F0904J
