Fortune.com - Careers - How to Encourage Bright Ideas A cute little article by Anne Fisher who talked to Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder, authors of "Ideas are Free", it makes a couple of interesting arguements for already proven best practices.

For example - why shouldn't you offer financial incentives for great cost-cutting/revenue boosting ideas? "Consider: A worker in a European wireless company stumbled across an error in the billing software that was costing $26 million a year. He suggested a simple fix, but his boss blocked it. Why? The company's reward system would have entitled the employee to a fat check and a lot of fanfare—and what boss wants that kind of attention drawn to his mistakes? " There are of course, many, many other reasons - several far more compelling for companies with more advanced idea management processes (for example - cash also kills collaboration - and collaboratively developed ideas are exponentially more likely to be great ones than those without input from other participants) - but it's a frequently unheard arguement.

There are other equally interesting arguements - including a rather lengthy baseball one to show that companies shouldn't just focus on "blockbuster" ideas - all in all worth reading as it only takes about 3 minutes..