Quest for the Creative Idea Bonus 2
OK, before I write anything else, I need to say that this is not about anything that happened to me at work and it’s simply an idea I thought of in the shower this morning. (I think of a lot of stuff in the shower or on the loo, I find my thought to be free when I don’t have pants on. 
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So the idea is as follows:
I think that if an employee of a company comes up with a great idea, that is above and beyond his normal work, and doesn’t involve a pitch the company is working on and the company decides to use that idea (for profit or not for profit), that employee must be paid a creative idea bonus.
The reasoning behind this is very simple. There are a lot of really creative people stuck in cubicles in large companies. These people can actually add value to the company they work for, but because they know their ideas will just be used to make the company richer while they will probably remain in their cubicle with the same salary they started with, they won’t come forward and another profitable idea is lost.
A good example of an idea like this that helped a large corporate company is Google’s Gmail. When Paul Buchheit started with Gmail, it was something he did in his spare time and as it started to become better, internal staff at Google started using it. Eventually the product became good enough for Google to package it as a product and use it as an ad serving platform. Gmail is now used by more that 150 million people on a daily basis and in 2009 there was hinted at revenues of $100+ million range for Gmail and Google Apps.
Recently, Google profiles and Google Buzz was also integrated into Gmail and it seems that this once small personal idea has turned into the heart of Google’s future social endeavours.
I don’t know if Google paid Paul any for of an “Idea Bonus”, but imagine one of your employees is sitting on the next Gmail, wouldn’t you want to know about it? Let’s make it a profitable experience for both parties involved.
