EMPOWERING CREATIVE EMPLOYEES: PHASE-SPECIFIC SUPPORT IN THE FRONT-END OF INNOVATION

Abstract

Employees often do not speak about raw ideas, to avoid a loss of face. Therefore, they struggle to develop their ideas further and share them in the workplace. Since research on the unconscious processes of idea development in the front-end of innovation is scarce, we explore this phenomenon by identifying the most prevalent needs for ideation in literature. We evaluate these needs by surveying 122 employees of a German automotive company. Our results show an overall hierarchy of needs and four clusters of employees based on the indicated needs in different phases of their idea development process. Employees with many ideas have the most demands. Employees with fewer ideas demand more social interaction and access to information technology to gather information and evaluate ideas. We find that the demand for resources varies significantly throughout the idea development process. Therefore, organizations must address employees’ needs differently, depending on what phase of the idea development process their ideas are in, and the number of ideas submitted.