IDEAS ARE FREE (English, Paperback, Robinson, Alan G., Schroeder, Dean M.)

Ideas Are Free sets out a roadmap for totally integrating ideas and idea management into the way companies are structured and operate. Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder draw on their ten years experience with more than three hundred organizations in fifteen countries to show precisely how to design a system to take advantage of this virtually free, perpetually renewing font of innovation. Robinson and Schroeder deal with two fundamental principles of managing ideas that are highly counterintuitive - the importance of going after small ideas rather than big ones, and the problems with the most common reward schemes and how to avoid them. They describe how to make ideas part of everyone's job, and how to set up and run an effective process for handling ideas-how to take a good idea system and make it great. And they show how good idea systems have a profound impact on an organization's culture. At the end of each chapter they provide "Guerrilla Tactics for the Idea Revolutionary", actions to promote ideas that any manager can take on his or her own authority, and that require little or no resources.

About the Author
Alan G. Robinson coauthor of Corporate Creativity, is a professor at the School of Management of the University of Massachusetts. He has served on the Board of Examiners of the United States Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award. His research into the best and worst practices in continuous improvement has won a number of awards, and has taken him into organizations in many countries around the world. He has advised more than sixty organizations in some ten countries on how to improve their creativity.