Creating the Creative Climate - Part 1

Articles In This Section:

· Creating the Creative Climate - Part 1

· Creating the Creative Climate - Part 2

· Creating the Creative Climate - Part 3

· Creating the Creative Climate - Part 4

· Creating the Creative Climate - Part 5

· Creating the Creative Climate - Part 6

· Creating the Creative Climate - Part 7

· Creating the Creative Climate - Part 8

· Creating the Creative Climate - Part 9

· Creating the Creative Climate - Part 10

· Creating the Creative Climate - Part 11

· Creating the Creative Climate - Part 12

· Creating the Creative Climate - Part 13

Thompson Products, Inc., of Cleveland, had a problem: expensive polishing belts used in one of their operations kept fraying and breaking. Engineers couldn't find an answer, but one production employee did: Emma Gabor put nail polish on the belt edges, "Just like stopping a runner in my hose." The company paid her over $6,000 for the idea; the idea saved the company about $43,000 a year.

One of the greatest photographic laboratories in the world spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to develop a film that would take pictures in color. But when color film was successfully developed, it was by two traveling dance-band musicians who had been using their hotel bathtubs as "laboratories."

During World War II, regular production employees of the B. F. Goodrich Company turned in over three thousand ideas a year—a third of which were good enough to merit cash awards. And General Motors says that today they receive about thirty thousand usable ideas a year from their employees.

A new method of assembling electronic components saved the Army (and U.S. taxpayers!) $4,200,000 the first year it was in use. The inventors were two Signal Corps civilian employees, Stanislaus Danko and Moe Abramson, who received $10,000 for the idea. The award was made within the framework of the government's Incentives Awards System which, in one year, received over 294,000 suggestions from government and military workers; adopted 79,000 ideas for use; paid out $2,365,000 in awards.

Today, developing and building airplanes is a multimillion-dollar business. Huge research and engineering staffs constantly strive to improve planes, to make them better, safer, and more efficient. And who started all this? The Wright brothers—two bicycle mechanics.

One final example: in Minneapolis, an "ordinary" machinist, who had never been to college, received a check for over $50,000 from a company that manufactures giant "electronic brains" because he was able to give them something that even one of their million-dollar "thinking machines" couldn't—an idea on how to make a troublesome mechanism operate better.

These are just a few examples to demonstrate that imagination isn't confined to a select few people who happen to have positions in an organization chart indicating that they are responsible for thinking. A leading industrial personnel man recently said that if Thomas A. Edison or Alexander Graham Bell were to try to get a job in the research department of nearly any large corporation today, they probably wouldn't be hired because they didn't have the technical knowledge to be inventors! It is a fact that when Mr. Bell first got his idea for the telephone, he didn't know anything about electricity—he had to learn everything he needed to know about the science, right from scratch, before he could develop his invention!