Ideation:

As an organization which need to survive on highly innovative ideas how do you make sure that you create an environment suited for idea generation from your employees. In all the organizations an employee is absorbed in routine day to day activity , there are very few like google who have a special 20% of office time is left for the employee to work on the ideas which appeal to them. If we look back , historically organizations have given almost no chance to its employees to generate ideas and implement the same. Most of them had very few key decision makers at the top who were the only people responsible for various ideas and their implementation. There is hardly any effort to manage ideas and innovations. One of the most impressive innovation management I have seen is in John Deers, the global agri equipment organization really knows how to select the best idea and implement it. It has a structured way to do it , it encourages its employees to come with new ideas and some of the best are chosen to be presented in a 3 day long event in the organization , after which the most impressive one is selected for implementation.
Recently I came across another very innovative ways to select ideas in GE, the Global technology group started Idea trading in its department, here employees have registered their ideas in a virtual exchange, each employee has been given virtual currency of 3000 rupees and a trading account for this exchange , once he logs in he can start trading ideas and the price of an idea goes up and down depending on the volume of its trade.
It really make sense to set a structure for generating ideas in organization and giving some of the best once a chance of implementation. Just imagine if one idea can create organization of worth billion dollars than how many brilliant ideas can come from thousands of people in that organization. This is the reason processes like six sigma specially focus on methodologies of idea generation.
One of the oldest method of idea generation is war , most of the revolutionary ideas including Internet were generated during war. Now a war can not be started inside an organization to generate ideas but definitely an environment can be created where every employee feels the heat of competition from outside world, I guess that is what ad agencies best at and that's how they keep generating ground breaking ideas.