Fact is, every person generates up to 6000 ideas in their head every day. At the same time, innovative ideas within a company are often only recognized by a small group of people in a single department. That’s how thousands of employees’ ideas are wasted. For this reason, Toyota Financial Services (TFS) wanted to make a change by leveraging its employee base.
By enabling everyone in the company to share their ideas, Toyota Financial Services made it possible for everyone to take part in shaping the company's future.
Our Credo along the way:
Simple, fast, transparent and accessible for everyone: To gather innovative ideas and activate everyone within the company, we wanted to find an approach that would enable Toyota Financial Services’ employees in the most convenient way - leaving no idea behind.
Our approach should support the entire process from submission over the collection to evaluating and selecting one final idea. All while making it shine end-to-end.
To tackle the challenge, we developed and implemented a program that enables the company to prepare to select the winning idea: The TFS Idea Accelerator.
As an initiative that is replicable globally and scalable, we chose an easily adaptable platform that leveraged synergies to identify new opportunities.
In addition, we created a workshop concept to empower employees and equip them with the right toolset to develop their ideas.
The result? A handbook including all learnings, doings and processes to replicate the initiative globally. The impact? Together with Toyota Financial Services, we transformed the corporate mindset and motivated over 200 employees to actively shape their company's future.
There are some critical factors that determine whether or not the initiative will be a success. In addition to ensuring inclusivity, i.e., involving the entire organization regardless of position, focusing on simple and easy steps to remove barriers is key.
Extensive communication to ensure everyone in the organization knows about the initiative, as well as empowering and training employees, so they are truly engaged and motivated, cannot be neglected. Moreover, the visible commitment of the entire top management is of fundamental importance.
"The TFS Idea Accelerator initiative was an entirely new approach to open innovation in our organization. Strong collaboration with Tangity empowered us to include and enable the whole organization and showcase the power of joint creativity and thinking outside the box."
Ideas
submitted
Pitched to Top Management
innovation projects
Part of initiative
countries
Engagement
employees
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