Many companies have driven innovators out the door – and into their own companies – by limiting creative work to a select group of anointed ones and keeping the rest of the team out of the innovation process.
Now some employers are taking more energetic steps to retain these budding entrepreneurs. As Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) was building the HPE Innovation Law Lab in 2018, Emiliano Baidenbaum, Chief Counsel for the Americas at HPE’s Financial Services business unit, and Jeffrey Fougere, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Innovation Strategist, wanted a more inclusive approach to innovation within the HP legal department. The legal department is very focused on generating creative ideas, with events such as hackathons a regular activity.
Fougere, a patent attorney Idea Matchmaker to make innovation easier across the organization, working with a team of colleagues in Technology and Human Resources to bring it to life. This platform captures employee ideas in a giant database so colleagues around the world can view them and easily connect to discuss and potentially develop them. The mobile interface was launched company-wide in 2022 and is now available to more than 60,000 employees.
“Our team members are the eyes and ears of day-to-day operations,” says Fougere. “They are the ones who see inefficiencies in our processes or new opportunities. Giving them the power to come up with an idea and easily connect with their peers to bring it to life is really powerful.”
Jeff Fougere, Hewlett Packard Innovation Strategist, and a team of his colleagues created the … [+]
Idea Matchmaker also uses an automated algorithm to share ideas in its database with team members likely to be interested in them. Every two weeks, every employee in the company gets an email about an idea on the platform they haven’t seen before.
Initiatives like Idea Matchmaker are part of a wider trend that James Taylor, a global keynote speaker on creativity, describes it as “creativity behind the scenes.” By encouraging collaboration between ‘creative pairs’ of colleagues, creative teams and even people plus machines, companies of all sizes are paving the way for more inclusive innovation, enabling the creation of micro-enterprises and innovative business units within their companies, said Taylor.
“For years, we’ve been sold the fiction of the lone creative genius—the ubiquitous idea that creativity is purely an individual pursuit,” says Taylor. “The traditional media especially likes the idea of the person on stage who is in the spotlight, the lone scientist who discovers the cure for a terrible disease, or the CEO on the front page of a magazine, as if that CEO single-handedly built that company. The single, lonely genius makes for good movies and stories, but it’s a lie, a useful fiction.
“What you rarely notice when you go see your favorite band, or see that tech billionaire give a talk at TED, are the hundreds or thousands of people ‘backstage’ involved in creating that innovative concert or company,” says Taylor. . “The truth is that creativity is as much about what happens backstage as it is onstage. Creativity is collaboration, a team sport. ‘Backstage creativity’ is about getting the best out of everyone, not just the superstars in your industry.”
Taylor was once a “backstage creative” as he helped manage the careers of high-profile rock stars and Grammy Award-winning music artists. Then he stepped behind the curtain and became a keynote speaker, experiencing the other side of creative collaboration.
“An audience member only sees the creative artist on stage, but they rarely see the hundreds of people backstage who are just as much a part of making a successful and innovative show as the person with the microphone in their hand,” says Taylor.
At HPE, Idea Matchmaker caught on so quickly that it is now used throughout the company. “It’s about creating an ongoing culture of innovation,” says Fougere. “If you want to innovate, but have to flip through thousands of projects, that gets tricky.”
Given the size of HPE, Idea Matchmaker has helped break down the layers of organization that team members must navigate to get initiatives off the ground. “Once you have an idea, it helps you get in touch with the right people and actually test, approve and launch it,” says Baidenbaum.
The project is not just about monetizing ideas. The company measures the return on this backstage creativity in other ways, such as the number of connections made in the team and the ideas viewed by team members. According to Baidenbaum and Fougere, HP also values idea generation and collaboration because they contribute to culture. “We used the analogy of a dating app, where a technology like Bumble or Tinder is really powerful because people use it every day, and makes the process of finding people effortless and fun,” says Fougere.
In May, Idea Matchmaker reached the long-awaited benchmark of 100,000 ideas viewed. “That was a huge milestone,” says Baidenbaum. “Some ideas have been viewed thousands of times.”
One of the drivers of Idea Matchmaker’s success is the explosive growth of technologies that lower the barrier to entry into the creative arena, such as low-code and no-code tools that enable non-engineers to develop technical products.
“Traditionally, it’s been so difficult for them to follow all the steps to bring an idea to life that it’s somewhat limiting,” says Fougere. “Some of those limitations are no longer relevant as we use technology in new ways.”
Now Baidenbaum and Fougere want to further refine the platform, essentially ensuring that all backstage creatives on their team can collaborate effectively, across language barriers.
“We’ve found that there’s a real limiting factor in people’s involvement in the innovation process, not because of the technology or the idea, but because of the communication of that idea,” says Fougere. “We’re trying to think of ways we can use technology, including big language models like ChatGPT, to take someone’s core of an idea and articulate it in the most compelling way. We have seen promising results using some of these tools as a communication or writing assistant.”
How much “behind-the-scenes creativity” appeals to innovators in large companies remains to be seen, and will likely depend on how these organizations capture, implement, and reward their ideas — or respond when they choose not to pursue them. The history of entrepreneurship has been driven by founders who left their companies because they found a better way of doing things and wanted to capitalize on their ideas. Some of these innovative types may never feel they can get the freedom or rewards they seek in a corporate environment.
But for those who prefer to be part of a large team and leverage an employer’s resources, “behind the scenes creativity” may be the way to discover and unleash their hidden talents. Taylor says, “The first step is unlocking the creativity you were born with.”
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