If you develop a good supporting foundation and environment for creativity and innovation in your company you will never run out of ideas.  There are several things you can do to make sure you are getting all of the good ideas out of your teams head and on to something more concrete like say, paper.  Here are a few tips and tricks that I consider to be essential for developing an innovative workplace.

Never ever ever judge and idea.  Just because it doesn’t hit the genius button the second you hear it or think it doesn’t mean that it isn’t genius.  Most raw ideas need a little room to grow.  Make sure everyone in your company knows that every idea is considered valuable and while you may not use all of them you definitely want to hear them.

Visualize every idea.  No matter what context the idea there is probably a mental picture to go with.  These don’t have to be master works of art but enough to help share the vision with the idea.  Even if it is a bunch of stick figures on a piece of paper it will help.

Encourage constant brainstorming.  As we mentioned before there are not very many raw ideas that are perfect.  It helps to bounce an idea around from brilliant mind to brilliant mind.  By the time the idea has fully formed and everyone is excited about it you have a lot of questions answered and a workable idea to move forward with.

The last and final idea is to encourage problem solving.  Too many companies silently encourage employees to keep their complaints and ideas to themselves.  Those companies are missing out on their most valuable assets.  Encourage your employees to identify every problem that they can and come up with ideas to solve the problems.  These can be personal, company, or customer problems but no matter which of those it is, you are fixing a problem that will help your business.

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