Every day, front-line staff see a great many problems and opportunities that their managers do not. As a result, they have plenty of ideas to improve productivity and customer service, to offer new or better products or services, or to enhance their organizations in other ways. Recent research and experience show that roughly 80 percent of any organization’s potential for both performance improvement and innovation lies in these bottom-up ideas. Sadly, however, most organizations do better at suppressing these ideas than promoting them.Knowing how to tap the enormous potential in bottom-up ideas is a key core competency for any manager today. Whatever your goals, you need your people’s ideas. When you gain the ability to implement twenty, fifty, or even a hundred ideas per person per year, everything changes. The first two-thirds of this session are about how high-performing idea processes work, and how to build and lead an idea-driven organization – one whose employees are solving problems and proposing improvement ideas, tied to management’s important goals, on a daily basis, and as a matter of the organization’s culture and the way it operates. There is a lot to learn, much of which is counterintuitive.Once we have covered how the best leaders and organizations encourage and implement large numbers of ideas, we will turn to how to increase the impact, creativity and innovativeness of the ideas that come in. We will cover the six elements of corporate creativity and how to implement them. Participants will walk away with a roadmap for turning creativity in their areas of responsibility from a sporadic hit-or-miss proposition into something consistent they can truly count on.