Know-How Exchange : Just for Fun

It appears that you're looking for a magic wand: something that's free, easily taught, easily done, and with little change to your normal culture. In my experience, true innovation requires more than a shower of ideas. It needs a clear focus, a clear understanding of the "hard edges", and knowledge of the available resources. It's also going to be disruptive in at least one dimension - otherwise, you'd likely already have done this. Without knowing these details, we're all going to be entering into a guessing game, and it's to no one's benefit.

If your company is truly interested in increasing revenue or innovating new ideas/systems/markets, hire an innovation consultant who can guide your team through processes that won't simply generate ideas, but will also create group buy-in, and help instill a culture of innovation.

If your company is simply looking to have a suggestion box (How will the ideas be evaluated? By whom? How will they recognize something good if it's something out-of-the-box?) then you're likely to be wasting your collective time. Most suggestion box ideas never generate any action, and the people who offer suggestions often feel disenfranchised.

I'd be glad to discuss this project further with you, if your company wants to enlist the help of an innovator.

Hang on a mo! Let's have a closer look, shall we? Because the sort of stuff you want is what I do, okay?

You've asked some questions -

1. Ideas MUST have merit [you need ideas that are relevant]

2. Ideas must not have been done before. [that doesn't matter out of the box thinking will always bring you unique ideas - they must be relevant though otherwise you'll have pink windmills pumping wine]

3. Must be carried out at little or no cost. [no: what you need is a modest campaign that costs little but makes you money - scale it outwards so that the dollar you put in gives you a dollar fifty out. That's the ground rules for PPC. It's pretty easy]

4. Must be measurable. [PPC is ideal for this you can measure ROI down to the penny]

5. Cannot be dependent on significant changes to current protocol or practices. [that's one of the ground rules]

6. Cannot greatly stress any departments [let's look at how much stress they're under because you're not doing this kind of marketing, shall we? You should find that customers asking you to work for them relaxes departments]

7. Must make a significant impact [that's not something anybody can guarantee - however when standard practices for PPC give a click through rate of around 3%, my out of the box ideas can deliver 10-15% CTRs - in any case, getting $1.50 back for a $1 spend is significant. Usually it's more]

8. Easily trainable, if need be. [If they're good at what they do, all they need do is implement the ideas that we come up with. For example if they're already good at using the Google Adwords interface, I can organize the Ads and landing pages - you can simply administer the rest. That implies they're any good at Adwords; the basics are relatively simple]

Work out who your most profitable customers are. The 80-20 principle gives you a rough idea that 80% of your profits comes from 20% of your customers. That means to say, your good customer drives way more profit than the ordinary. It's using the high end of the bell curve if you extrapolate these metrics across a statistical graph. Not all clients are equal; sure, treat them all equally - but look out for the ones who reciprocate.

Look out for how they do it, why they do it and what the results are. Remember that one more of these customers will drive way more profits than the ordinary. These people will have a character that just happens to match the things you as a company are best suited to doing.

Work out who they are (that could be my job) and make an ad especially for them. Then get more of them. That's when profits leap.

Work out who your worst clients are (I could give you alist right now but I'm off to Rotterdam in five mins) and sack them. Believe me when I did this, our turnover dropped 20%. My ex was aghast.

Our profits went up 30%.

This stuff works. Oh, and the customers call you too ... makes life kinda nice!

Thanks for those responses, but it looks like I need to give a few examples of past ideas to show why it's in the "Just for Fun" section:

1. Alternate Franchise and Corporate Shipping days rather than ship both everyday to save on boxes and shipping costs..
2. PDF all documents to save on ink.
3. wrap a rubberband on the pump a shampoo bottle to act as a stopper. This will lessen amount of shampoo released and will increase the longevity of the shampoo.

So the real challenge is to not think too seriously.

Thanks!

Here's an idea: Stop asking people to come up with money-saving ideas and focus them instead on ways to grow the business profitably.