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I have been studying my second masters degree at the Royal Institute of Technology in Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management. At the end of the program, when I was to write a dissertation, I thought of discussing how companies are neglecting their employees’ potential. They are the people at the very center of the business and usually they are the best people to contribute in an intrapreneurial or innovative activity.

It does not end there! These people are your employees, the more you get them involved, the more loyalty comes back. The most natural reward (for both sides).

Competition is the true driver of markets. It is the product of our environment. Unless a company is competitive it will not survive in the market it is serving. There is hardly any monopoly in a market, except when it is backed by the state. Sometimes oligopolies behave like monopolies but even the constituents have to fight for market share. To capture market share, companies constantly need to innovate their product or service as core competencies can remain unique for only a small period and eventually the competition catches up with an imitation or a new idea.

People pursue good health and will do anything new that will help them to live a better life. Corporates too do the same by pursuing strategies of improvements and breakthroughs that create new products and new markets. This is a continuous exercise and any let up, in health or corporate endeavours will invite a decline. Innovations are the engine that persuaded the corporate to innovate.

Despite the fact that the urge to innovate exists equally in the entrepreneur and an employee, the larger companies usually ignore the employee contribution. Some companies are seen to make a half hearted effort by offering reward for new or innovative ideas to their employees but there is no regulated or organised effort in this direction. There can be some results through rewards but these are few and far in between and just an improvement of the existing product or service and do not fall into the class of an innovation. It has been understood for very long that employees work for self satisfaction and self actualisation (Maslow, 1954) and this factor can certainly be harnessed by companies to meet the challenges posed by competition. The potential of an employee needs to be exploited for the benefit of the company. But what most companies aim at is setting targets for the employee and rewarding him on meeting the same. They never try to find out whether they can go beyond the target. The need is to find the potential and then to direct it towards innovative practices.

The PDF version of the whole thesis work: Using The Mental Force of The Employee