Workers of the World, Innovate

Research and development take a huge part of a company’s budget. For companies such as Pitney Bowes, AT&T, Cisco System, Electronic Arts, Wal-Mart Stores, and MetLife, it is often the difference between making huge profits off of sales or watching their competitors take control of the market. Companies will often spend hundreds of millions of dollars on research and development teams of a couple dozen people to create innovations to products as well as new products. These companies have come up with an innovative way to cut research costs: looking to their employees to create new ideas. Companies are purchasing software that allows for upper level management to mine ideas from the employees. Before this AT&T alone left the ideas of almost 200,000 people untapped, a huge resource abounding with innovative ideas.

Companies would often spend millions to hire professionals to create new products and innovations. They would often over look the thousands of employees already on the payroll as sources of innovation. With new software in place to harness the ideas that already are in the company, they cut the cost of research. As many companies are looking to decrease costs, as the economic future is unsure, this presents an easy and cost effective method of research. Companies such as AT&T are offering incentives for participating in the program; the person whose idea is chosen will receive a reward. Also to promote a greater development of the idea they are giving virtual money to their employees allowing them to bet on the suggestions. This does however create and ethical issue in the workplace.

Employers have always frowned upon gambling. It shows that employees are willing to take risky behavior, which could cause them to be a liability to the company. If management is promoting gambling in the workplace, what comes next is anyone’s guess. Gambling has, and for good reason, been associated with other risqué activities such as alcohol, sex, drugs, and other addicting behaviors. While companies cannot regulate what their employees do on their own time, many companies will list things that they view as a hazard to their employees. Gambling is almost always on this list and is seen to encourage other risqué behavior. For a company to promote this seems to go against the fundamental ideas that human resources put forth for their workers.

The concept of taking ideas from workers and using it a research and development creates a second more daunting problem. Pitney Bowes has a contest, called Innovation Idol, a play off the popular show American Idol. This pits its employees against each other. Management uses this as a way to get the ideas from their employees, taking some ideas right from the presentation. The people who came up with the ideas they use get a substantial reward. This causes a problem with worker unity. If management pits its workers against each other in a competition the chemistry in the work place is severely effected. Workers who were once friends will now be jealous of each other and try to vandalism others ideas. This in the long run will hurt the company as productivity will slack and eventually the mining of ideas will suffer. While this new software is a multimillion dollar industry it is tough for companies to adapt to the new challenges it presents.

Article Link: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/sep2010/tc2010097_904409.htm