Bright Idea Box by Jag Randhawa, Book Summary

What can a bright idea box do for your company?

The Bright Idea Box: A Proven System to Drive Employee Engagement and InnovationGreat ideas are currency for any individual and organization. As a small business owner, if you’re looking to innovate, give employees the opportunities to contribute ideas. Bright Idea Box shows you how to get started.

Looking to increase employee engagement? Engaged employees provide better customer service. This is important because if you're engaged, you're more productive. You can also encourage employees to come up with ideas that will add value to customers and the company. Ideas can solve problems.

Your customers have problems that they’re looking for services to solve them. Why not give your employees the opportunity to become problem solvers. These ideas can:

• Create operational efficiencies.
• Improve business processes.
• Increase customer satisfaction.
• Grow the business.

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What is the Bright Idea Box by Jag Randhawa About?

Bright Idea Box is about creating a program that makes it easier for employees to suggest and develop ideas to improve business and value for customers. How can you use the ideas to improve:

• Functions.
• Processes.
• Products.

Definition of Innovation

“Innovation is the mingling of new and existing ideas to add value for customers, the company and the marketplace.”

Bright Idea Box: How Can Innovation Help Your Business?

Innovations can help to:

• Improve products.
• Introduce new products.
• Implement new marketing strategies.
• Lower costs.
• Improve customer service.
• Sell products in new ways.
• Expand markets.
• Find the genius idea.
• Come up with game-changing products.
• Generate breakthrough ideas.

How can you marry disparate pieces of information? How does your product add value for customers?

Innovation = Invention + Execution + Adoption

1. Disruptive Innovation: Introduce Products/Services that didn't exist.
2. Sustained Innovation: Allows you to stay competitive. Improve products and services.

You have to innovate on multiple levels to stand out. There are times when you have to change the business model. How can you use technology to innovate?

Bright Idea Box: 4 Areas to Focus on Innovation

• Revenue generation.
• Business model.
• Cost reductions.
• Business process.

Revenue Generation: This has to do with ideas that contribute to top line growth. It’s creating new products, expanding to new markets, bundling products, new sales channels, and expanding to new territories.

Business Model: How it transforms resources into products and services. Business model innovation entails changes to one or more input resources that deliver value to customers.

Cost Reductions: This encompasses ideas that lower the operational costs of the business. New materials, technology advancements and automation, change how products are delivered to customers.

Business Processes: Set of activities to transform resources into products and services of greater value to customers. And a business process can be competitive.

Business Process Categories

1. Customer Facing: Any activity that affects the customer experience.
2. Internal Processes: Internal processes employees follow to do their jobs. Critical for scaling the business.
3. Partnership Processes: Activities employees do to collaborate externally.

Top Down Innovation

• Management initiated.
• Vision driven.
• Large changes.
• Information rich.

Growing the business and meeting customer needs is management's responsibility. However, that's the old model.

Bottom Up Innovation

• Interaction rich.
• Incremental changes.
• Idea driven.
• Employee initiated.

Encourage employees to develop new and innovative ideas. But top down initiatives often go against the tide. Engaged employees are more in-tuned with customers. However, successful organizations are a mix of top down and bottom up initiatives.

Have a unique offering, high service standards, and customers shower you with loyalty and referral business. Service is a promise.

• How can you innovate a promise?
• What are innovative ways to develop service that reduces cost, but improves service?

Look at what services customers value the most and how preferences change under different situations.

Bright Idea Box: 6-Step Master Innovation Program

1. Mobilize
2. Amass
3. Support
4. Triage
5. Execute
6. Recognize

Step 1: Mobilize – Marching With Purpose

Define and document the program’s vision and purpose. A purpose statement captures the program’s essence. How it works, and the types of ideas you’re seeking.

Purpose statement comes out of three things:

1. Why do you want to create this program?
2. How will it add value for the company and customers?
3. What kinds of ideas are you expecting from employees?

Are you trying to:

• Solve problems.
• Exploit opportunities.
• Respond to changing market dynamics.
• Develop new products.
• Enhance existing products and services.

The above questions feed into objectives, guidelines, tools, and processes. The program’s objective is to engage employees in improving products, operations, and services. Documents should outline areas of focus and the program’s business objectives. Program objectives must be aligned with business goals and values.

Opinion: Emotional reaction based on knowledge, experience, and state of mind.

Suggestion: Recommends actions to alter future experience.

Idea: Propose specific actions with rationale that justifies these actions.

Step 2: Amass – Collecting Ideas

Create a way to capture ideas. Capture and organize ideas. Have a systematic approach to deal with development and evaluation.

NABC: Needs, Approach, Benefits, Competition.

Needs: What customer needs it addresses.

Approach: How the problem will be solved.

Benefits: What custom benefits this approach will bring.

Competition: What the competition offers and at what costs.

Idea Questions

1. Name: What is the name of the idea?
2. Description: What is a brief description of the idea, including what problem it addresses? How does the idea solve the problem?
3. Benefits: What value or benefits will the idea deliver to the customer or company?
4. Cost-Benefit Rationale: How much will it cost to try to implement the idea? Does the cost justify the benefits?

The filter forces employees to carefully think through the idea before they decide to submit it. There needs to be an Idea Capturing Tools and an Idea Submission web page for the program to work smoothly.

Step 3: Support – Assuring Commitment

Create an environment where management encourages employees to submit and develop ideas. Employees have to feel comfortable submitting ideas.

Points of Investment

• Idea-capturing system.
• Employee time.
• Seed capital.
• Implementation resources.

Step 4: Triage – Screening Ideas

Create effective ways to screen and prioritize ideas. Have an Idea Steering Committee (Idea Support Team) that meets to review and discuss ideas.

Idea Life Cycle

For the system to work well, employees need to know where ideas are in the life cycle.

1. New submissions.
2. Under review.
3. Needs development.
4. Accepted.
5. Implemented.

 The Bright Idea Box The MacGyver Secret How to Get to Great Ideas How to Get Ideas

Step 5: Execute – Implementing Ideas

Have a process to test and implement ideas. Need someone to take ownership of this task. And you need resources to implement the idea. The program has to be a priority for the organization. Otherwise it will fail.

Flow of Idea Implementation

Validate and Refine

Owners: Idea Steering Team and Idea Submitter

Prioritize

Owner: Idea Steering Team and Management

Implement

Owner: Idea Steering Team, Idea Submitter and Implementation Team

Step 6: Recognize – Recognizing Employees

Have a process in place to recognize employees for their ideas and efforts. Have a good reward system. Monetary compensation can backfire.

Bright Idea Box: Engagement

Drivers of Higher Engagement

• Ownership: Give people responsibility and ownership.
• Personal Growth: Help people to grow personally and professionally.
• Solution Mindset: This is important to think about solutions and not problems. Therefore, foster a Solution Mindset that will promote progress.
• Partnerships: Treat employees like partners.

Bright Idea Box: Managing Change

Creating a bottom-up innovation involves a cultural shift. It means giving more power to employees to increase employee engagement. The Bright Idea Box is an employee development tool that redirects employees to focus on solutions.

If you need help and would like a program that’s already set-up to help you read more books, Join MoreReads: Blueprint to Change the World, click the link to buy.

Developing Innovation Skills

Innovative thinking is a skill, which includes:

1. Curiosity: Being curious and questioning the way that things have been done is key to innovative thinking.
2. Listening: Customers usually tell you what they want, but you need a way to gather the information. Also give employees permission to act on what the customer wants. The Four Seasons does that very well.
3. Mining: Look at frustrating situations as an opportunity to solve problems. They’re also a great source of new ideas.
4. Borrowing: Oftentimes the problems you’re solving have been solved in other industries and even in other products. It’s your responsibility to find those solutions. Make a habit of looking at other industries.
5. Networking: Hang out with people from different disciplines so you can learn from each other.
6. Writing: To find ideas you have to look for them. Write down your thoughts to stimulate cross-fertilization.
7. Problem Solving: Find innovative solutions to the challenges you face.
8. Ask Why 5 Times: Asking Why five times gets you to the root cause of the problem. It’s important to make sure that you’re solving the right problem.
9. Reversing the Challenge: How would you go about solving the opposite of the problem. This technique helps to get you out of group think.
10. Prototyping: Rough version of your product. The prototype gives customers an idea of what to expect.

Taking Things to the Next Level

Change is never easy. And you may face resistance from upper management when trying to introduce an innovation program. When someone hears the word ‘innovation’ they immediately think it will cost lots of dollars. A good approach is to focus on little improvements at a time. And keep improving things over time. A good book to read is Little Bets.

Have you read?

7 Lessons from Little Bets by Peter Sims

Final Thoughts: Bright Idea Box by Jag Randhawa

This is an excellent book to use as a guide if you want to introduce an innovation program to increase your employee engagement and satisfaction.

Books Recommended

100 Ways to Motivate Others

Outliers: The Story of Success

Mindset: The Psychology of Success

The Future of Management

Happiness Hypothesis

Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard

Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators

Good to Great

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