The employee initiative toolkit

Abstract

Companies understand the importance of employees’ engagement in its innovation capability. The contact between employees and customers is a great way to spark new opportunities for ideas relevant for customers (Kelly & Storey, 2000), they have in-depth and highly context-dependent operational knowledge and have creative potential. They make an interesting often unused source for innovation potential. In the case a single employee or a small team of employees that are not assigned to the task are indeed the sources of the generation and implementation of such new ideas, products and processes, it can be called employee-driven innovation (EDI). Many organisations, therefore, try to engage employees and facilitate employee-driven innovation to increase its innovation capability. With the current global trend of servitization, which is the process to extend the customer relationship by bringing value also after a product purchase, companies will invest in the development of services. When companies would like to increase their innovation capability through employee-driven innovation, employees will therefore likely be expected to create ideas for services in which they are often not educated or trained. One of the challenges for a company in employee-driven innovation is to create and sustain a company culture and environment that generates the right conditions for this. Especially if this should be supportive of new service development, as services have intangible qualities that make it harder to test the actual value for the customer even with educated staff. Hence, the first aim of this thesis is to understand the challenges and effective ways of organising employee-driven innovation for new service development. Through a literature review and participatory design sessions with employees from a service solution provider, I created an approach that displays what the managerial, organisational and employee roles can do to facilitate employee-driven innovation in three parallel steps. In addition, TOPdesk, an ESM service solution provider, was also interested in increasing its innovation capability through employee-driven innovation. They captured their interest in a company objective that aims to create profit from a new market, coming from employee initiatives. I found that TOPdesk employees need guidance and support in their employee initiatives, to enable them to create and develop new service ideas. Therefore, the second part of this thesis is about creating a design toolkit that fulfils these needs and an implementation design roadmap in order to facilitate employee-driven innovation at TOPdesk. 
The employee initiative toolkit is a structured approach that guides and enables employees with new service ideas to effectively explore its value with the goal to convince the management team it should become a new service for TOPdesk. Through covering idea selection criteria, aspects of a business plan and pitch canvas, employees are able to do this. The purpose of this toolkit is to increase the effectiveness of employee initiatives for new services and therefore contribute to implementing employee-driven innovation for new service development and reaching their company objective to increase its innovation capability.