Georgia-Pacific Uses Innovation Brainstorming ToolGeorgia-Pacific Uses Innovation Brainstorming Tool

Like many companies, Georgia-Pacific Corp. wants to dream up new ideas for products or improve processes. To do so, it often would pull together a few dozens managers, executives, or others for a day of brainstorming.

Now, thousands of Georgia-Pacific employees from all parts of the company can electronically participate in brainstorming and easily submit ideas and build on each other's suggestions. The company uses Idea Central, idea-management software from vendor Imaginatik. In the past two years, the software has helped Georgia-Pacific's collaborative brainstorming process produce many new product ideas and process improvements that might otherwise never have been realized. Some of those ideas have translated into new products that are being test marketed, as well as cost savings in the millions.

Using Idea Central, Georgia-Pacific regularly holds "ideation" events that can include tens of thousands of employees from across the company or, if preferred, several hundred workers from specific operations putting on their thinking caps. The ideation events, which are usually announced by E-mail, typically last a few weeks, during which employees can enter suggestions into Idea Central from their PCs at their convenience.

"We can invite as many employees are we want for these challenges. We tell them we need your creative brains," says Kelly Smith, Georgia-Pacific's senior brand manager of innovation. This solicitation results in ideas from parts of the company and can tap into the minds of some employees with "25 or 30 years of experience who had ideas for a long time but no way to express them," she says.

Employees have access to all the proposals to see if anyone has already suggested their ideas. That access also allows cross sections of the company to flesh out ideas. For instance, a production worker may have suggestions on how to cost-effectively manufacture a proposed product, and the marketing staff can offer up ways to promote it.

The software let the $19 billion manufacturer, which employs 55,000 people in 300 locations worldwide, keep a history of all ideas, so suggestions that might not be feasible now can be re-examined in the future. Idea Central tools help managers spearheading the innovation challenges from across the company collaboratively evaluate the ideas, as well as search, sort, and rank them.

Because the ideation events usually go on for a few weeks and generate hundreds or even thousands of ideas, Smith says the software hasn't yet sped up the innovation process in her Georgia-Pacific group compared with traditional in-person brainstorming sessions. However, the biggest innovation process benefit has been the volume and quality of ideas that get generated, she says.

One of the brightest ideas generated so far using Idea Central was during an ideation event in which 16,000 paper-towel product employees participated. A mill worker suggested using a less-expensive process to manufacturer the cardboard tubes inside paper-towel rolls. The idea resulted in changes that sliced 4% from production costs on the many millions rolls of paper towels Georgia-Pacific manufactures annually.

Idea Central also allows employees to submit suggestions even when there isn't a formal solicitation campaign under way, Smith says. Her group has been running ideation events about three or four times a year.

Georgia-Pacific employees are rewarded for participating in the electronic brainstorming events. They earn 100 points for every idea they submit, and accumulated points can be traded in for prizes, such as a day off, Smith says.

A recent study of 17 customers using Imaginatik's idea-management software found that the average return on investment for the first year of an Idea Central initiative was 251%, with an average net return of $19,851 per 100 employees, the company says. Imaginatik says the companies' benefits and savings were magnified after year two to an average ROI of 927% and average net return of $104,983 per 100 employees.

Imaginatik CEO Mark Turrell says an Idea Central implementation for a company with 1,000 employees costs between $50,000 and $120,000.