I Am an Idea Factory! The Leader’s Guide to Bridging the Gap Between New Ideas and Results

What would it be worth to your business if a team met weekly for an hour and solved an important challenge?

Any organization can become more innovative by using this simple tactic; a regular ideas meeting to solve problems or create new initiatives. When meetings are based on trust and a sense of discovery, they become idea factories. This book is based on two observations:

1. Many great ideas already exist in organizations: they are in the minds of staff, suppliers and customers.

2. Few organizations have dedicated processes or systems to regularly harness and use those ideas.

There is only one truth about innovation: Talking about innovation and expecting this makes you innovative is about as effective as talking about physical fitness and expecting this makes you fit. There is far too much talk about innovation today and far too little action to create idea factories.

This book shows you how to become an idea factory to harness the best ideas of your staff. Professional Marketing magazine in the UK concluded its review of this book with this: “I couldn’t help thinking that it would be better for our senior executives to read the book—as it sells the need for creativity management and provides a way to allocate time and space to allow ordinary employees to drive the process.”

This book is jargon-free. It talks of ideas, not ‘paradigm-shifting strategic initiatives’ and other management clichés that add little insight and understanding. This book is for you if …

1. You want your teams to improve the way they solve problems and deal with change. You will find enough background to understand what it means to be innovative.

2. You want a strategy to help your staff develop new skills for innovative thinking. This is part training and part practice.

3. You want a practical way to focus on important challenges that need to be addressed. To get results means you must create opportunities to solve your challenges and to create new opportunities.

4. You are prepared to dedicate time and resources to help grow your capacity to innovate.

Innovative organisations continually outperform their competitors. People inside our organisations make decisions every day that impact the future. To make good decisions means that we need to solve problems well.

Part one provides key insights for shaping a more innovative service-focused business; one that continually solves problems and creates opportunities by finding new ideas when and where they are needed.

Part two is a series of tools and challenges. This Idea Factory Tool Kit has specific challenges you can use to create solutions to problems or to identify new opportunities.

Part three is about earning the title of being an idea factory. The pathway to earning the title of is to provide the tools, resources and the right environment that tells everyone, “We are open to new ideas and new thinking.” You cannot buy this success. You must create it. Start by turning your organization into an idea factory.