Employee Creativity and Suggestion Programs: An Empirical Study

This paper takes a closer look at a functional strategy known as the innovation or creativity strategy. It is used by growing numbers of companies to take advantage of the imaginative capacities of their entire workforce instead of relying on a handful of specialists or fostering the emergence of a few marginal “heroes” within the organization. The strategy involves the introduction of an improvement program based on employee suggestions. The goal of the research described in this paper was therefore to document twenty two such programs introduced by manufacturing companies in Quebec, to describe the operating methods used, and to summarize and analyze the results. Twelve large companies (more than two hundred employees) and ten SMEs (Small and Medium Sized enterprises with between twenty five and two hundred employees) took part in the survey.