I heard a story yesterday about a chap who worked in the postroom for the Gap. He was new to job and like a lot of new people was questioning different practices that he came across. One thing he discovered fairly early on was that the Gap had been mailing (via Fedex) multiple copies of the company's newsletter to the same addresses across the globe. They'd been doing it for years apparently. He questioned this practice and decided to open up all of the individual envelopes and put all the newsletters in one package with a note to distribute at the other end. What's more he told all of his colleagues in the mailroom to do the same.
That one simple idea saved the Gap £50k!
My point. Simple ideas are all around us and, if you're like me, you have lots of ideas every day - ideas of what can be created, changed, improved or applied to other areas to solve problems for either our customers or ourselves and save and make money in the process. However if you don't share these ideas down, the ideas won't be developed and progress won't happen.
In these challenging times, marketers are being tasked to do more with less and that requires thinking differently and innovating around processes. But how do you do that - well it all starts with an idea and one simple way of collecting good ideas is to set up a 'Future Box' whereby you ask other people to submit ideas for saving or making money. .
You'll be amazed at the different ideas you'll get - from creating new products to simply downloading free software.
If you're looking for inspiration - have a look at What If's website: http://www.whatifinnovation.com/default.
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