# Employee Ideation: Three Different Approaches URL: https://michaeljanzen.com/employee-ideation-three-different-approaches/ Published: 2025-04-05 13:19:47 Modified: 2025-04-05 13:19:48 Image: https://i0.wp.com/michaeljanzen.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/ChatGPT-Image-Apr-5-2025-01_10_50-PM.png?fit=1024%2C683&quality=80&ssl=1 ## Summary A practitioner with nine years of experience managing employee idea programs across a 250,000+ employee organization compares three approaches: open social ideation platforms, targeted innovation challenges, and traditional suggestion boxes. Targeted innovation challengesu2014time-boxed events where leaders define specific problems and employees submit solutionsu2014produced the most consistent business results with the least administrative overhead. The author recommends starting with this model, supported by an AI-powered SaaS tool, before scaling. **Keywords:** employee ideation, idea management, innovation challenges, suggestion box, employee engagement, open ideation platform, targeted innovation, idea management software, enterprise innovation, employee idea program, crowdsourced ideas, AI idea routing, idea management at scale, internal innovation ## Entities - Targeted Innovation Challenge (DefinedTerm) — A time-boxed ideation method where business leaders define specific problems and employees submit, vote on, and implement solutions within a structured four-week cycle. - Social Bubble-up Ideation Platform (DefinedTerm) — An open ideation platform where employees post ideas publicly, others comment and vote, and popular ideas surface to leadership through community managers. - Traditional Suggestion Box (DefinedTerm) — A private idea submission system where a central team reviews, routes, and tracks employee ideas to department-level decision-makers. - Employee Idea Management Program (Thing) — An organizational system for collecting, evaluating, and implementing ideas submitted by employees. - AI-powered SaaS (Technology) — Cloud-based software using artificial intelligence recommended for automating idea review, routing, and decision-maker support in employee ideation programs. ## Q&A **Q: What are the main approaches to employee idea management?** Three common approaches are open social ideation platforms (where employees post and vote on ideas), targeted innovation challenges (time-boxed events tied to specific business problems), and traditional suggestion boxes (private submissions routed to decision-makers by a central team). **Q: Which employee ideation approach works best at large organizations?** Based on nine years of experience across a 250,000+ employee organization, targeted innovation challenges deliver the best balance of employee engagement and business impact with the least administrative overhead. **Q: What are the main challenges of running a traditional suggestion box at scale?** At scale, suggestion boxes require large staffing to review and route ideas, place additional workload on subject-matter decision-makers, involve complex multi-department routing, struggle to meet submitter expectations, and risk becoming a dumping ground for complaints. **Q: How does a targeted innovation challenge work?** A typical four-week cycle has leaders present a specific business problem in week one, employees submit solutions in week two, all participants vote on submissions in week three, and leadership selects and implements top solutions while celebrating the whole team in week four. **Q: Why do open social ideation platforms fail for idea management?** Social platforms depend heavily on active leadership engagement. When leaders do not regularly review ideas, employee participation drops sharply. They are better suited for collaboration and engagement activities than for structured idea management and implementation. ## Content 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. 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:  - Everyone had a voice—By providing a central place to share ideas, you give everyone a voice, which initially feels like a big win. - 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.  - 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: - Expensive to staff at scale—The bigger the company, the bigger the team you’ll need to review, route, decision, and implement ideas.  - 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. - 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. - 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.  - 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: - Make meeting employee expectations your top priority - Obtain executive support across the company - Build automated idea review and routing using AI - Build an AI assistant to help lighten the load on decision-makers - 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.