'I like the fact that all around, opinions are so different and yet can also be so similar'. This is something that Eloise said to me recently and it got me thinking. The first thing we need to do is to separate the world in Academia and the corporate world. My reason for the separation is that is the world of Academics peer review is process that occurs very often, your peers rate the quality of the work that you do and publish. Their input ranges from full praise to completely rubbishing the work that you've published. In the corporate world however, review by your peers is not really accepted or used. In fact sharing of ideas does not occur freely, yes some teams may claim to have 'war room' sessions where there is a free flow of and ideas and innovation but it is masked by something else.
Let me explain. In a corporate environment real sharing or ideas and knowledge only really happens very high up in the organisation. Its usually between very senior management or executives and that's because they don't (usually) feel threatened by one another. The sharing of ideas is done freely because there is an environment of trust and an unwritten agreement that what we do is for the benefit of the company. No (ok well very little) one up man ship exists. This allows colleagues at these levels to use one another as sounding boards and when it comes to ideas and innovation the more minds the merrier.
In contrast to this the environment for staff levels below this is very cutthroat. Colleagues rarely if ever share ideas for fear of 'idea theft'. They shy away from using one another as sounding boards for fear that a colleague will present the idea as his own and gain recognition from it. This stifles creativity and definitely is bad for business. The question is how to get around this. The work space is inherently competitive and gaining recognition for what you do is very important for gaining credibility and creating that upward movement on the corporate ladder.
A concept I've been toying with is called the 'Ideas Registry'. How it works is that when a staff member has and idea they can log onto a system and have the idea registered. This process then creates some 'ownership' of the intellectual property. Once the idea is assesed it either gets full management support and a task team is established to explore the idea further or it can get partial support and this will mean a basic investigation will be done (a single human resource). Companies have versions of this running through their suggestion box process and many have fully fledged departments that investigate innovative ideas so they're on the right track to creating a truly collaborative environment. Because in my very humble opinion that's a huge gap at the moment in most sectors, truly original though that through collaboration with your peers becomes a truly wonderful business concept or process. Some serious thought needs to be put into developing models that are fair, transparent and allow these ideas to be properly explored.
In closing, I guess I'm saying, be that change and start to openly discuss ideas with you peers and use them as sounding boards. A stolen idea that makes it to implementation is much better than one that never got to see the light of day because you were scared. It will be a bitter pill to swallow but you'll know that truth about where the seed for the idea first began growing.
The blog is written for Eloise Pieterse, who believes that reading and finding out is an important characteristic to have and that curiosity is equally important...but that is for another blog. Later.
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