Employee Ideation: Three Different Approaches

TL;DR: Over nine years, I’ve implemented three idea management approaches: Social platforms worked when leaders engaged; targeted innovation challenges delivered the best results with the least overhead; and traditional suggestion boxes gave everyone a voice but were resource-intensive. Based on my experience, I recommend starting with targeted innovation challenges.

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I’ve spent the last nine years implementing different employee idea management programs; some approaches work better than others. Here’s what I’ve learned from running three distinct models across an organization of 250,000+ employees.

The Social Bubble-up Approach

The first program was an open ideation platform where employees could post ideas for everyone to see. Others could comment, vote, and collaborate. Popular ideas naturally gained traction and caught leadership’s attention, aided by community managers who informed executives about trending ideas.

When leadership was engaged, this bubble-up approach worked well. Ideas improved through collaboration, departmental silos dissolved, and innovation became an ongoing conversation instead of a quarterly exercise. I still remember how a casual comment from a legal partner transformed a product manager’s idea into a patent. That kind of cross-pollination wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

But the failures were just as instructive. Employee enthusiasm crashed quickly in groups where leaders didn’t prioritize reviewing ideas. Nothing kills creative participation faster than seeing your ideas vanish into the digital void. 

Flipping the Script: Targeted Innovation Challenges

After mixed results with the open platform, we tried something completely different after serious market research, pilots, and testing. Instead of asking for random ideas, we had business leaders identify specific business problems they needed solved, which reversed the typical ideation flow in a way that fundamentally changed the dynamics.

We would hold time-boxed events, and the process was straightforward:

• Week 1: Problem statement presented to the team
• Week 2: Team members submit their solutions (both as teams or individuals)
• Week 3: All participants reviewed solutions and voted; the best ideas rose to the top
• Week 4: Leadership selected and implemented the best solutions, and the whole team was celebrated by leadership

This approach connected employee creativity directly to business priorities—and the results were remarkable. What impressed me most was that even people whose ideas weren’t selected reported positive experiences. The transparency throughout the process—seeing exactly why certain solutions advanced while others didn’t—kept everyone engaged.

The downside? Creative ideas outside the defined challenges went nowhere. Some brilliant but poorly presented solutions lost to lesser but better communicated proposals. Coordinating these events required leadership buy-in and support, which would become easier as the success stories spread through the organization.

The bottom line was that this approach consistently delivered tangible results. Leadership got implementable solutions that solved real problems, and employees felt valued for their problem-solving abilities. It was a win-win.

Traditional Suggestion Box

Then, the company leadership changed, and we were asked to build what I would describe as a traditional suggestion box. Employees submitted ideas privately, which a central team read and routed to appropriate department-specific teams and then to their organization’s decision makers. We built tracking systems to communicate the implementation status back to submitters.

Benefits: 

1. Everyone had a voice—By providing a central place to share ideas, you give everyone a voice, which initially feels like a big win.
2. Leadership support—For this approach to work, you must have the support of the company’s leadership. Luckily, we had that support, which elevated visibility, support, and adoption. 
3. Cultural change—When the entire company is shown the value of reviewing and responding to employee ideas, it changes how everyone thinks about the organization and their work in a positive direction.

Challenges:

1. Expensive to staff at scale—The bigger the company, the bigger the team you’ll need to review, route, decision, and implement ideas. 
2. Additional workload—Decision makers from every business line had to be trained and encouraged to participate in and review ideas relevant to their subject matter expertise. These leaders already had much to do, so accepting this new responsibility was mixed as you might imagine.
3. Complex Processing—Manually reviewing and routing every idea was an imperfect process. The complexity of ideas often meant they needed review by multiple business lines and decision-makers, which added complexity to the routing, decisioning, and implementation of ideas.
4. Meeting Expectations—The biggest challenge, a real human challenge, was that no matter how the idea was handled, meeting the submitter’s expectations was nearly impossible. 
5. Avoid becoming a dumping ground—The last challenge is to prevent your suggestion box from becoming a dumping ground for complaints or transforming into a support desk. 

My Recommendation

If you’re considering implementing an idea management program in your organization, save yourself some pain and start with targeted innovation challenges. They deliver the best balance of employee engagement and business impact with the least administrative overhead. Find an AI-powered SaaS solution that best matches your organization and then experiment with a small group before expanding to the entire company. Also, be sure to provide a distinctly separate place for employees to get support and submit complaints.

Social platforms can work for idea generation but are not great for idea management. They’re better for other employee engagement activities and collaboration. If you go this route, spend more time and energy on automating employee listening to discover ideas and a separate app for managing their implementation. 

A suggestion box would work well for a small company, but I wouldn’t take this approach at scale unless you did five things from the beginning:

1. Make meeting employee expectations your top priority
2. Obtain executive support across the company
3. Build automated idea review and routing using AI
4. Build an AI assistant to help lighten the load on decision-makers
5. Connect it to your current issue-tracking system(s) to streamline implementation

Ultimately, meeting employee expectations is very hard. Ironically, the most important trait of a good product—user acceptance—is also the biggest challenge for this idea management approach.

If you give a user a feature, it must work. If it doesn’t work, people won’t use your product. So, if your approach is flawed and doesn’t meet user expectations, don’t build it; choose another approach and try again.

Have you tried any of these approaches in your organization? I would like to know which aspects resonated with your experience and what other methods you’ve found effective.