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Your first challenge is to attract the “ideators,” the people who traditionally come up with the biggest ideas, regardless of the topic.
Great ideators tend to be a bit competitive. Tap into that. Post challenges—through your intranet, bulletin board, or e-mail system—on behalf of clients, and offer prizes for anyone who can come up with the answer within a set period of time. Competitive, inventive people will respond with novel ideas that you can adopt. The prize can be simple: a free lunch or sports tickets. If you have cash in the budget, even better.
And if you don’t have a current client project in need of solving, you can make one up. For example, if vacuum cleaners did not exist, how would you clean floors? The question isn’t as important as the answers. The responses you get will give you a great list of innovative thinkers.
Not only will you have a great technique for solving many of your most daunting challenges, you will also have the makings of an innovation roundtable to draw from in the future.
Source: “Finding Your Company’s Great Thinkers”
Original Publication: BusinessWeek
Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior
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