Hack:
Ideas Tree

Many big companies are not very efficient at assembling employees from various departments or regions together to collaborate on a particular idea or issue.  E.g. someone based in UK might have a great idea but no resources to pursue it while someone in Germany might have a left over resource and no interesting project to put them into.  These resources can take many forms: time, money, thought leadership, etc.

Solution

Any employee regardless of rank, department, country can set forth an idea (i.e. whatever is on their mind that they can't solve themselves e.g. due to lack of knowledge, resources etc).   that would guide the topic & scope around which ideas would need to be generated.  This would be done as frequently as required.

1) In order to make this idea widely available we could set up an on-line “idea tree” functionality e.g. if you have a topic you would like to discuss you post your initial question – the trunk of the tree and send it out e.g. you could send it out to people with specific job title, department, country etc. The initial "trunk " could be linked with e-mail or office communicator and recipients would get a message that there is a new" branch / message". Anyone can respond to the thread and add their comments, additional questions, build new branches.

2) Certain rules would have to be put in place to ensure this functionality is used appropriately. E.g. for multinational companies a common language would have to be chosen (e.g. all branches posted in English or the most common language); you can only post an idea after an initial research has failed; as a owner of an idea you need to timely respond to people’s questions. Also rules in terms of sending mass e-mails would have to be established to avoid spamming inboxes.

In addition a moderator will be required to monitor the discussion, make sure branches are unique (e.g. repeated questions should be closed and owners referred to the original branch), close old branches and if required assign branches to specific departments to improve chance of a good response.

3) The Tree could be enables not only on a traditional desktop but also through smart phones and PDAs to enable people to communicate at any time from any place.

4) The idea tree could be integrated with various social networking sites Twitter or Facebook. It could also be commercialised and sold to other companies.

5) As the tree grows in size and a critical mass is reached,  Senior Executives would select some of the best ideas for deeper level of development, perhaps commercializing the idea or developing some standard procedures that would be improvements on existing processes.