Fortune - "Get Employees to Brainstorm Online"

A growing number of big companies are taking advantage of the Internet, plus specially designed software, to run brainstorming sessions.
By Anne Fisher

If you're like most managers, you know you've hired some pretty smart people. Still, the suggestion boxes you have scattered around the place are gathering nothing but cobwebs, and in the daily rush of getting the work done, it's hard to find time to encourage would-be innovators to speak up. According to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers, almost half (45%) of lucrative ideas—whether breakthrough products or services, new uses for old ones, or ways to cut costs—come from employees. (Customers, suppliers, and competitors contribute the other half.) How can you make sure you're not squandering any in-house brainpower? A growing number of big companies, including Georgia-Pacific, W.R. Grace, Sun Life Financial, and ChevronTexaco, are taking advantage of the Internet, plus specially designed software, to run brainstorming sessions that allow people at far-flung locations to "meet" online and hash out solutions to particular problems. The technology lets employees see, and build on, one another's ideas, so that one person's seed of a notion can grow into a practical plan.

It seems to work. Says Paul Westgate, director of innovation at W.R. Grace: "Before we started doing this, in 2001, we had no systematic way of developing new ideas." Since then, Grace's chemical-manufacturing division has run 34 online campaigns to solicit employee suggestions. From those efforts a total harvest of 2,685 ideas has yielded 76 new products and 67 distinct improvements in how things get done. Some employees, responding to a campaign called Customers Do the Darndest Things, reported that customers were telling them about unexpected uses for existing products, leading the company into new markets that have boosted annual revenues by as much as $3 million. "To make online brainstorming effective, ask only those specific questions to which you really want answers," says Westgate. "Then be ready to act on them."

At Georgia-Pacific, for example, rather than ask for general cost-cutting ideas, management zeroed in on shaving the cost of the cardboard tubes inside rolls of paper towels. Senior operations manager Jeremy Wren notes that the company spends about $30 million a year on the components, which the "consumer really doesn't care about." Thanks to the speed of the online system, mill workers from among the company's 16,000 North American employees quickly responded with little changes that shaved about $1.2 million a year, or roughly 4%, off the cost of the tubes. Of course, not every idea is a winner. Says Wren: "We've gotten responses ranging from the interesting to the bizarre."

Mark Turrell, an Intel alumnus, is CEO of Boston-based Imaginatik, which makes the software Grace and Georgia-Pacific use. "More companies are trying to manage innovation as they manage every other important business process," he says. "So it will become a race to see who does it best." By his lights, it comes not a minute too soon. "In the global economy America isn't the low-cost producer, so you need great brainpower," he says. "Where else is your value added?" Where indeed?