Every single person who works for your organisation has the potential for ideas that will make a change to the way you operate. Suggestion schemes capture ideas that can be used now, or later, to improve your organisation.

Involving, recognising and rewarding employees creates a culture of creativity and innovation and one where people achieve greater job satisfaction.

Joining ideasUK will enable you to connect with other organisations in order to share in their experience and knowledge in this vital area. But we already have teams, project groups and other Quality Initiative processes in place to achieve changes.

Very sensible, but what about all the people not involved directly in these particular groups? Do you not want to hear from them? Evidence suggests that individuals are just as likely to come up with good ideas as teams.

If you want to maximise your innovation potential use all that is available to you.

Our survey information over the past 15 years indicates that over 99% of organisations achieve more in savings than their programme costs to run, in fact they are a profit centre.

There are some service sectors where ideas produce an increased cost however the benefit attained is in respect of improved customer service.

The ideasUK Annual Survey provides members with valuable information.

No one can doubt that the person most likely to come up with the idea is the person doing the job. What this question really begs is should we recognise or reward them for it?

There is nothing to be lost and all to gain by recognising people, even for a job well done, let alone an idea that will improve the process.

Consider the idea as an investment in your organisation. You can use it and benefit from it. Why not reward it?

There are two routes you can take.

Tell people their ideas are all part of their job and see how soon ideas dry up or recognise and reward people and see how your database of ideas starts to grow.

A suggestion scheme is like a wheelbarrow; it goes nowhere without someone pushing it. It requires a willingness on behalf of the organisation to promote it and sustain it.

The results will far outweigh the investment. ideasUK members can benefit from exclusive training in both setting up and the continued marketing of a programme

This is an area where initially you are looking for quantity not quality. You will only get good ideas if you get lots of ideas.

Think of it like panning for gold. If you're not in the stream picking up every piece, many of which will not be gold, you are not in with a chance of the big nugget coming along.

Statistically you will reject (but recognise the input of) 60 out of every 100 ideas. Of the remaining 40 you will implement 25 and reward them based on the value of the idea.

The 15 good ideas you cannot implement will be given a small award to recognise a good idea that may be of use in the future.

Evaluators of ideas need to understand the process. ideasUK members can take advantage of exclusive training for evaluators.