Smeal College of Business - "A Key To Unlock Entrepreneurial Talent"

A Key To Unlock Entrepreneurial Talent

By Anthony C. Warren, Director of the Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

Nearly every company acknowledges the strategic importance of innovation and entrepreneurship. But few know how to measure or increase this capacity. This is our mission in the Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The Center offers wide-ranging research and a management discipline for entrepreneurship and innovation that can benefit organizations of any size.

A partnership with Imaginatik, a leading knowledge management company, provides Farrell Center researchers with rich data, which, under analysis, reveal key drivers that organizations can implement to improve their innovation capacity.

Case Study: Georgia-Pacific

Need

The greatest untapped asset in any organization is often the creativity of its people. Georgia-Pacific Corporation, a global consumer and building products company, realized they could quickly and inexpensively develop new product ideas by tapping into the wealth of talent and brainpower inherent in their work force. The problem they faced was finding an efficient way to solicit ideas, protect anonymity, and foster collaboration.

Network

Idea Central, a web-based application that couples idea generation with a vigorous review and collaboration process, was the perfect solution for Georgia-Pacific. The collaboration features of this powerful tool, already best in class, have been enhanced through a research partnership between The Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Imaginatik, a software development and professional services company specializing in enterprise Idea Management. Georgia-Pacific uses Idea Central to solicit new product ideas from thousands of employees simultaneously. An award and recognition system encourages contributions, and participants may remain anonymous if they choose.

Knowledge

During its initial campaign, Georgia-Pacific's employees used Idea Central to generate 260 new product ideas in just one week, and then targeted 19 of the best ideas for product development. Georgia-Pacific found that employees consistently generate more commercially viable ideas than previous externally-led new product development programs. And this collaborative approach often allows the company to accomplish in one week what would take months to achieve with other programs or product development firms. Best of all, employees are more engaged in executing the ideas because they were involved in developing them.

Copyright 2004 Penn State Smeal College of Business