The most valuable innovation engine? Your employees
Create infrastructure to tap into their ideas, and you may just disrupt a few industries.
I cannot tell you how many amazing companies have been founded because the employees felt stifled, detracted, or downright disrespected.
Do you know Zoom? Yeah, that one. It came about because a former Cisco engineering exec went to the org and said, "look let's just focus on having better and consistent image quality by focusing on latency issues and persistence."
He was patted on the head and told a good idea, but no. Now Zoom has all but eaten Cisco's lunch when it comes to video meeting quality.
Have you heard of Away, the billion-dollar luggage brand? Those founders came from Warby Parker. And the list goes on and on.
This is why unlocking the innovation in your team member's heads is so crucial to winning. It's so important that we created a no-risk program just so businesses could test out the ideas their employees had. It's called Agency.
We recognized that a lot of the perception from employers was that launching a new idea would take capital and most of all, distract the employee from their core job. I thought...there's has to be a way to leverage our Knowledge Capital investment model to take on 90% of the risk and give the companies 90% of the rewards if it goes right. This resonates with so many having an issue of not wanting to be competing with their top talent, yet not knowing how to handle their entrepreneurial tendencies.
I was one of those people. When I was fired from the last full-time position I had, back in 2018, I was told: "there cannot be two CEOs."I knew from that moment that I would always allow anyone on teams that I led to express their thoughts and ideas. In fact, KnowCap wouldn't be half as good as we are at executing if it wasn't for me constantly providing air cover for our team's ideas. We're about to launch a Spotify playlist, a fashion "brand", and look at launching more leadership development frameworks all because of team members. The fashion "brand" came from a team member that started less than three weeks ago.
It all starts with letting everyone know that there are no "bad" ideas. However, there are bad thought patterns. If you are just throwing an idea out there, and I've made a promise to evaluate every idea thoroughly, then that's a waste of time for me. So when someone has an idea, they have to go through a proposal process that requires them to think through many aspects of the idea. How will it help further our mission? How much will it cost? What processes will it shift? Which teams need to be involved? Is there a collaborator?
Once we have that information, we know a few things about that person.
That they're serious
That they've recruited other people to put their social capital on the line for the idea/team member
That this idea has parameters
When you allow your team members (even interns) to bring their full minds to work, you will be surprised by what they come up with. Some of them just may add a billion dollars to your balance sheet. No leader wakes up wanting to make a Cisco-sized mistake because of the hierarchy of ideas. As Ray Dalio says in Principles, anyone can have an idea. If they are "believable" persons then we take every idea seriously.