Few weeks ago, I got one insight from a friend who works in factory.

He had an idea how to improve the production process. He spoken with his supervisor and they made this improvement which produces less waste and production is faster.

I must say that, I spoke with him few months ago and encouraged him to make this, as it will be done in my company with no problem, but we have innovation culture…

What happened is that another supervisor wasn’t been happy with that, and idea was rejected, idea-creator (my friend) got also some bad words like “Don’t change the status quo”, “Why to make changes?”… not an innovative firm, as you can see.

One more thing: they tried to start some improvement incubation with prehistoric thing: idea-wall. Of course, they got only trivial ideas, bunch of them was not worth mentioning.

I assume that’s how things are done in factories across Eastern Europe. They don’t listen to ideas and they think, that they don’t need it.
But at the end, they will need some kind of innovative culture, am I right?

Imagine that the innovation culture is incorporated and that management is fostering innovations. Then middle management must support ideas and this situation will never happen.

This was factory example, but same can happen in every business environment. It’s not enough to start some kind of innovation process and to say “let’s have ideas!”, as this have to be supported from top and carefully incorporate to whole organization.