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This blog post was written by James Pasmantier, Brightidea's Vice President of Professional Services.

Generating workplace engagement is difficult. Business thinker Gary Hamel cites a Towers Perrin study that discovered only one-fifth of employees are truly engaged in their work and would “go the extra mile” for their employer. The rest ranged from disengaged (38%) to indifferent (41%). This sense of detachment and not having a voice in the company is also a large factor in why employees leave their jobs.

However, there are a number of different ways to motivate and engage your employees. The two most common methods are reward and recognition. While often used interchangeably, they are really two different practices—each with its own benefits. Find out more about which ones to leverage and how to dramatically impact the success of your innovation initiatives.

Rewards

Rewards—both financial and non-financial—can play an important part in an innovation initiative.  However, at Brightidea we recommend that financial or material rewards be reserved primarily for public campaigns, where incentives are necessary to attract attention and drive large-scale participation from external parties. For example, GE’s Ecomagination Challenge has attracted tens of thousands of participants motivated by the $200 million purse.

For internal-facing challenges, financial rewards can become problematic considering logistics of global application and the ability to sustain motivation overtime. 

Some issues include:

• Employees may consider financial rewards an entitlement, and continue to expect them in the future.
• Cash incentives may not translate appropriately to different countries with differences in pay and cost of living.
• Contests offering rewards may have legal implications including correct reporting and taxation.
• Financial rewards may not be sustainable for long-term or large-scale campaigns, as well as for smaller companies or departments with limited budgets.
• Most importantly, financial rewards may actually prevent building a culture of innovation by promoting participation driven by personal gain.

Alternatively, nonfinancial and nonmaterial rewards can effectively motivate your employees while incentivizing being part of a larger team and collaborating for the improvement of the company as a whole.

Nonfinancial rewards can be:

• Lunch with the CEO
• Assignment to develop and implement the idea, and see it through to completion
• Days off or workplace perks (e.g. premium parking spots, etc.)

By thinking outside the box and creatively tapping the spirit of co-creation and collaboration, non-financial rewards can have a positive impact on sustaining participation from employees in a variety of different internal innovation campaigns.

Recognition

Recognizing employees for their contributions can provide much more than just a psychological benefit. Management consultant and author Cindy Ventrice states that, as long as employees have what is considered a fair wage, “money is not really a factor in how motivated they are.” Instead, it comes down to feeling valued in the workplace, that their thoughts and opinions matter, and that there is opportunity for learning and advancement.

Managers can recognize employees in a variety of ways:

• Public acknowledgement during meetings or other events
• Employee of the month plaque or featured on the company website or internal intranet, or campaign homepage
• Acknowledgement in the company newsletter or blog
• A personal note to say “thank you”

Transforme Consultores is a business strategy, innovation and IT consulting firm based in Santiago de Chile. With over 25 years of expertise in strategic innovation and IT management, Transforme has helped world-class companies all over Latin America to set up and execute projects that drive productive change and business success.

Since 2008, Transforme has been a Premier Partner and Reseller of Brightidea, bringing Brightidea’s innovation management software the region’s top companies like LAN - one of the largest LATAM airlines, Grupo EMIN - the multi-national engineering company, CONAFE - the electricity leader, and PETROQUIM - the number one polypropylene provider in Chile.

Guillermo Beuchat, CEO of Transforme says: “Brightidea is the ideal partner when implementing our value-added innovation programs. Our clients appreciate the functionality, ease-of-use and performance of the WebStorm and Switchboard applications. Brightidea’s services are also top-notch providing us with professional skinning, content development tips and support for our implementation consultants.”

Brightidea is honored to work with companies like Transforme, on the technological forefront in a country that continues to push innovative approaches to fostering business progress.

To learn more about Brightidea’s global partner program and network, please contact Paul Tran at ptran@brightidea.com or visit The Brightidea Partner Community.

Posted by Janelle Noble

Fresh off the highly successful first phase of the Ecomagination Challenge – updating the Power Grid— GE has launched phase two of the challenge, the search for new ways to Power Your Home. GE decided to launch the second challenge, which opens today, January 18 and closes March 1, because phase one was such a success, according to GE CMO Beth Comstock. In just three months time, the Ecomagination Challenge collected over 4,000 ideas from over 70,000 global users, making it perhaps the largest crowdsourcing competition of all time.

Comstock also said that phase two, which like phase one will be powered by Brightidea, will be for eco-friendly home appliances because the demand is so high and because such a large number of applicable ideas (1,000+) have already been submitted through the Power Grid challenge.

In the second phase, eco-home ideas submitted in phase one will be reexamined along with newly submitted ideas, as participants will vie for what remains of the $200 million GE and its venture capital partners set aside for its challenges.

Phase one had $55 million of investment given out, so there's still plenty of capital to be had. In addition to the millions of dollars of investment capital GE and its partners will dole out for top ideas, five Innovation Awards worth $100,000 each will be awarded for the most innovative ideas, which will also be considered for future partnerships with GE.

For more information on this Challenge and to submit your idea for an Eco Home, see http://challenge.ecomagination.com/home.

Posted by Kyle Miller

Working as an Innovation Analyst for Brightidea I am consistently exposed to leading innovation strategies from Fortune 500 companies such as GE, Cisco, Adobe, and Kraft, to name a few. So in November 2010 I decided to mix things up a bit and expose myself to some alternate innovation strategies: those coming from impoverished rural communities in the developing world. Kampong Speu, Cambodia (about 2 hours south of Phnom Penh) is one of the poorest provinces in Cambodia, with nearly 70% of the population living below the poverty line (on a meager $0.45/day). Further compounding the troubles caused by extreme poverty, Cambodia also suffers from widespread government corruption (some estimates are as high as 90%), a vile human sex trafficking industry (girls are as young as 12 years old sold into prostitution), and the gruesome remnants of a war-torn past (over 5 million unexploded land-mines remain in rural areas).

But there is good news. In 2008, after living and volunteering in Eastern Africa for 17 months, I founded a nonprofit organization based here in San Francisco that would try to reinvent the concept of charity. Put simply, we guaranteed that: 100% of all personal donations go directly to the cause and not to costly administrative structures; full autonomy of all projects is given to our locally-based "partner" organizations who operate directly within the communities we are helping; and full transparency into all our projects is provided through photo, video, and voluntourism, showing exactly how project funds were spent. Furthermore, all of our projects are evaluated for sustainability and impact and empower communities from the ground up. Now, in 2011, Groundwork Opportunities operates 10 projects in 7 countries helping over 5,000 people per day, 250 of whom live in the village of Krain Rohong, Cambodia.

Before starting our project in Cambodia, villagers in Krain Rohong did not have access to clean water, carried hefty debts with local loan sharks (oftentimes with interest rates of over 20% a day) to provide themselves with food and shelter, and were frequently forced to traffic their own children when they could not repay their loans. Now, only 9 months later, the same villagers have a fish pond, a rice bank, and several vegetable gardens complete with produce brokers who travel from market to market in search of the best prices. These villagers sell baskets, clothing, even cupcakes, depositing all profits into a community savings account from which village members can borrow money interest-free. They have purchased 25 cows ($200/ea) as well as several chickens and ducks ($5/ea), and have still managed to save over $700 in less than a year. All because of a freshwater well. While it may not be obvious at first, that simple act of drilling a freshwater well in the village center meant women and children could travel shorter distances to get water (previously they were traveling up to 5km one way), leaving more time to plant gardens or take up crafts making, which could then be sold for a profit, which could then be saved, which could then help to lift them out of poverty....

Enhanced WebStorm Setup Wizard 

A new wizard for creating WebStorms in a fast and easy process has been added to the Enterprise Setup. Just go to Enterprise Setup and select “Create WebStorm” under the WebStorms tab.

After a new WebStorm has been created, a popup window will offer to take you directly to the new WebStorm page or to the Setup page where you can configure Access Groups for the new WebStorm.

2011 is promising exciting new developments and further accelerating progress in the field of innovation management. At Brightidea, we are honored to support impressive organizations such as yours at the forefront of innovation and we are looking forward to continuing to learn and grow with you in the future!

Speaking of the future, we would like to use this opportunity to give you a brief outlook on the road ahead. But in case you blinked during 2010, let’s start with a quick recap of some of last year’s highlights at Brightidea:

2010 was groundbreaking in many ways, from amazing innovation successes for our customers to Brightidea’s record growth and the development of our new Innovation Suite, the new industry standard for end-to-end innovation management software.

Success Stories of Innovation Excellence

GE’s $200M Ecomagination Challenge, powered by Brightidea, not only took open innovation to an unseen scale with over 4,000 collected ideas and over 70,000 users from all over the world, its results also exceeded expectations. Currently the corporation is implementing twelve new revolutionary business ideas and will launch its next open contest, “Powering your home,” today, January 18th.

Other companies have used Brightidea to expand their impact in new emerging markets. Cisco, for example, launched its first I-Prize Competition in Russia, a future key market for the technology leader, while YTL ran its $1M mYprize contest, an open developer challenge for the world’s first nationwide 4G communications network in Malaysia. Awards for innovation excellence were received by our customers HP, WMS, CLP, Nielsen and Adobe.

We are also proud to have supported many Government 2.0 initiatives across the world, among them the U.S. Department of State, The Republic of Ireland, The Flemish Government and the City of San Francisco.

The Evolution of Innovation Management is here! 

In November 2010, Brightidea released its long-awaited new Innovation Suite, the only true end-to-end innovation management software solution to monitor the social process of innovation from concept to cash. If you haven’t yet, take a look at our new product tour and contact us for an introduction to the Innovation Suite’s ground-breaking new features and functions.

Going Strong…

Brightidea has been growing steadily and fast in the last 12 months, welcoming great new customers like Kraft Foods, 7 for all Mankind, Autoliv, GM and many more. To support our growing client base effectively, we have added seasoned industry experts and bright talents to our team and expanded our community of partners, including IBM, Rally,