Ideas That Spur Innovation

Several years ago Kimberly-Clark, maker of paper products "Kleenex and Huggies", drove the morale of its employees into the ground after massive firings and outsourcing. It was a disaster that resulted in the rehiring of hundreds of old employees and engineers while continuing to outsource others.

Trust had been broken, low morale and very low employee engagement was the result.  The infrastructure organization circled it's wagons. People were in a self-preservation mode.

When Kimberly-Clark hired a new VP of Infrastructure four years later to turn things around, he implemented a program to spur innovation. The VP took a venture capitalist approach where any employee could submit an idea and if accepted, make a pitch in 30 minutes or less. If the idea had merit, it received first, then second rounds of funding. If not, the employee's idea still got lauded on the company's internal Sharepoint site. He stated, 'Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. It's about what we learn from the failure. Not the failure itself. We celebrate that learning.'

Since then things have massively changed for the better.

Read the entire article  at: Creating culture of IT innovation includes rewarding failure