How Your Company Can Encourage Innovation from All Employees

Frontline employees often contribute the best ideas for process improvement, as Toyota and other companies have often found. In this article, the authors show how the kaizen approach to process improvement used at manufacturing companies can be translated to the context of knowledge work, where it can help companies identify opportunities for automating knowledge work. It revolves around the creation of an ideas platform and development toolkit that employees can share and experiment with. Accounting giant PwC has found that adopting this approach and providing extra recognition and rewards for participation on the platform has helped employees to realize over 7 million hours savings in work time