OK, you've spent the first couple of months working on a brand new innovation process to be set up inside of your established company. Together with the team you're part of, you've thought of an entire set of initiatives to collect and process ideas. You've worked hard to think of an internal communication model to effectively spend your value proposition to the final target, which is the entire working people.
Now what?
You (wisely) still hesitate to publish your communication through the intranet channels because you're aware you're gonna benefit from only one chance, just one token. If it'll be credible to prejudiced people, those being disappointed after years of feeling little consideration upon their potential and competence, then they will provide you with some valuable contribution, in terms of incremental ideas. Otherwise they're not taking your implicit request for some extra contribution into consideration and you're not gonna have any further possibility to involve them.
It is all about credibility.
You cannot demand for such extra, contribution, which is complementary to what they usually do at work, for free. In such tough times, when your company needs to compete to survive and make up a future for itself and their working people, still there are so many colleagues acting as if the company has much debt to pay them for their former contribution. In these times innovation is not an option and anybody should feel the responsibility to contribute, to set up the basis for their company's future and for their future in the company. But you cannot act as if everyone must be aware of that.
In this context, setting up some rewarding policy and instruments is not only a duty, but a crucial task, if you want your new innovation process not to fail. Rewarding can involve: extra income awards, visibility, integrating innovation contributions to already existing career drivers and extra corporate education possibilities. Configuring any of these possibilities will take interacting with and asking help from several company functions (such as HR, Legal, Internal Communication). For this to work, concrete commitment and sponsorship by the top management will be needed.
Another main point to consider, not to waste your only, precious, single chance to involve the working people an get them to contribute, is that you cannot assume your innovation process and communication is mature enough and ready. The best thing to do is to test the market ahead, to anticipate the potential feedback which might come from the target in terms of new ideas contribution. What you can do is to ask some of the organizational functions inside of your company to select some of their people and ask them to help you test your idea template. This will help to refine it and get it to a more "saleable" model.
It is also important to give the needed consideration to all those colleagues actually contributing with their preliminary ideas and suggestions. One way could be to give them some visibility through your intranet website.
