Finding the chase and cutting to it

but not many companies are comfortable taking the approach Google has or indeed IBM…

Indeed, at the moment, many companies are so busy trying to balance reorganisation against redundancies and making money against keeping old customers happy and new ones to your door.

 Where you have very large companies, there are often people who see better ways of doing something (e.g. expenses, time management, media production, community building) and often take the initial first steps to making that change, maybe to a paper, or even a prototype.

This is then the basis for their elevator pitch which they can demo until, within the company, they find a sponsor.  Initial development can then be funded and it can be released, a programme of support built round it and such ideas are then proper, supported and aligned projects.

Hey, I thought things had moved on a bit since then

they have, but funding models have not.  When Gary Hamel talks about needing a different way of motivating and enabling people in the creative economy (please don’t laugh, the economy is out there, whatever shape it is in), how can these, often small, projects be meaningfully funded?

Often these ideas and tools have the potential to form your operational tool set, your knowledge repositories and the means of accessing them, or ways of making the processes works as efficiently as possible.

These ideas may even form your next product catalogue.

How to support the ideas

at the moment, enabling your team, indeed your company, to be as agile as possible and be able to reward those with the potentially great ideas is not easy.  The space to gamble feels restricted to the few with the right ear.

Why not give each person in your organisation some “support credits” (I’m waiting for a better name)? In a large organisation these could be around 10 credits per person.

These can support anything: from a set of web pages that support a process to a video service to a search tool to a new way of looking at the filing.

When someone uses such a tool, they can support it by paying the team who run it one of their “support credit”.  (Think micro payments, an internal version of paypal supporting an individual to do a particular job).

So

OK, lots of the small things that make a huge difference need machine space to run on, need people to originally do the idea and then keep it alive.

Often, this work is unseen in a larger organisation and when changes are needed the original team can no longer support the item because they have had their prorities changed and no-one saw this as being a big thing.

I still don’t get it

OK, if this idea has consistently got, say 1000 credits, it’s not a small thing to a group of people in your company, indeed either 1000 people have paid 1 credit each or 100 have paid 10 each – so to them it’s important, either to a 1/10 of their “support” budget to 100% of it.

Maybe your organisation could not support actual cash going towards this piece but it’s obviously a key thing.

And now, not only do those “supporters” know it, but so do the team in question and everyone in the organisation.

But no-one will do any proper work

Fair point.  This is where group policy comes in: prioritisation and focus.  “Support credit” work needs to be correctly assessed and plans built around them.

Do this, and the effect may be survival of the fittest applications (imagine if your expenses system received no “Support credits”) and evolution of tool sets for no external expediture.  It could allow for organic growth of powerful tools  (viral comms) and a low cost way of recognising who comes up with these ideas.