Ideation Creation: Culture and Clarity Keys to Driving Big Ideas

As “innovation” has become a key buzzword in the business lexicon, the ability for an organization to generate ideas internally has become critical. Today the C-suite is demanding great ideas from all areas of the company. And often communications is responsible for creating and managing the idea generation “engine.”

In talking to ideation experts, PR News finds that the generation of ideas often suffers from a lack of clarity around the problem definition; a lack of specific customer knowledge; and a tendency to accept the status quo and make excuses for killing good ideas.

To be sure, on the PR agency side, clients are demanding game-changing ideas as well as guidance for structuring their own ideation processes, says Brian Burgess, senior VP of brand and talent at MSLGROUP New York.

What holds clients back, says Burgess, is a kind of institutional secrecy—the reluctance of companies to educate employees on their target audiences. “Companies need to share information on target audiences with their employees,” he says. “Creative forums need to be developed so employees can learn about customers and other key stakeholders. Armed with that knowledge, employees can come up with big ideas.”

Brian Ellis, executive VP at PR and marketing agency CRT/tanaka, says that after several years of research on ideation, the inability to truly understand the target audience is one cause of idea generation failure. Another is the belief that big ideas just come out of nowhere. On the contrary, says Ellis. “Big ideas are often a series of little ideas that, with expansion and contraction techniques, become big ones.”

 

SET THE MOOD

But to start with, you have to have the right culture to foster big ideas. At Dell, that starts at the top. “It takes an ongoing commitment, and Michael Dell has supported idea generation both inside and outside the enterprise,” says Christa Semko, Dell’s corporate communications advisor of internal digital media. “It’s really a part of our entrepreneurial spirit.”

Burgess agrees that the organizational environment has to be right. “You need to enable people to speak up and push that envelope to make things better,” he says.

At Hunter PR in New York, brainstorming is clearly part of the culture. Once a year the staff learns a different ideating technique at an off-site location. “Some are new, and some are refresher courses,” says Claire Burke, partner at Hunter. In the office, there are brainstorming sessions every Tuesday and Thursday.

That also transfers from the organizational to physical environment. Burgess says at MSL they have a “Creativity Greenhouse,” a large conference room that is the place to come and generate great ideas. At Hunter, employees’ thought processes are kept fresh with what Burke calls “pop culture junkets”—regular excursions to museums, sporting events, new restaurants and destinations that relate to specific clients.

 

PICK A PROCESS

And the perfect group to generate great ideas? Ideas on that vary. Hunter PR caps its sessions at 10 people and limits them to an hour and a half in duration. Ellis, on the other hand, prefers groups of two or three people—perfect for sessions of 30 to 40 minutes. “If you have eight people, we’ve found that three or four of them don’t participate,” he says.

Both Ellis and Burke stress the importance of bringing in a variety of people to the session, even if they have nothing to do with the initiative you’re addressing.

Ellis recalls a session with a large consumer products client that had requested 30 to 40 people participate in brainstorming. “Some of the best ideas came from people outside of their product groups,” says Ellis. “The fresh perspective works, because without it, you internalize ideas way too much within your team.”

 

DIGITAL IDEATION

For larger organizations, idea generation can originate from internal online forums. Such is the case at Dell, which has an idea forum called EmployeeStorm. “A company this size (96,000 employees worldwide) isn’t about a couple of ideas,” says Dell’s Semko. To the contrary, she recently took a snapshot of the forum’s activity since its inception in June 2007. To date there have been more than 25,000 comments, 5,600 actual ideas, and 260 ideas implemented. “Is that a good percentage or bad percentage?” Semko rhetorically asks. “Well, it’s one piece of the puzzle in our communications strategy, and an opportunity for employees to provide their thoughts and feedback.”

It’s Semko’s job to monitor the posts and identify clear ideas. She’s able to merge ideas that are identical, ensures ideas are entered into the right category and puts a status tag on them to track their journey through the system. Employees can comment on an idea and can vote for or against it.

Semko’s advice for administering such systems:

 

• Have an effective online communicator be an administrator.

• To engage business leaders in the idea process, have the ability to move from an online to an offline presence seamlessly.

• Have thick skin; people often get impatient as their ideas move through the organizational pipeline.

 

GIVE RECOGNITION

Finally, says Burgess, “Reward them for thinking out of the box, whether it's giving them credit or actually rewarding them with something.”

Such recognition just might help drive the Big Idea that moves the needle in your organization. PRN

 

CONTACT:

Brian Burgess, [email protected]; Brian Ellis, [email protected]; Christa Semko, [email protected]; Claire Burke, [email protected].


Phrases Not to Utter During a Brainstorming Session

In their years of ideation research, the team at CRT/tanaka has recorded a bevy of “killer phrases” uttered in brainstorming sessions by employee peers and supervisors—knee-jerk responses that squelch new ideas. “One of the challenges is to create a mind-set that everything is possible,” says CRT’s Brian Ellis. “Don’t allow limitations to get into play.” Unfortunately, it’s a common occurrence. Here are a few of the more common killer phrases, by category:

Overgeneralization:

• “It’ll never work.”

• “It’ll never win approval.”

• “People don’t want change.”

Put-Downs

• “That’s irrelevant.”

• “I’m the one who gets paid to think.”

• “You’ve got to be kidding, right?” (laughter)

Selective Editing

• “It’s not in the budget.”

• “We haven’t got the manpower.”

• “Obviously you misread my request.”

• “It’s not in your job description.”

“Great idea, but not for us.”