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Wanted: CEOs from India

: starting dot.coms. VC firms abounded to lend money to people with superior ideas. And the Valley attracted many talented people who could write software and implement ideas.

The implication is that companies need to duplicate Silicon Valley internally. The company should place a high value on new ideas and facilitate their collection and evaluation. The better ideas would draw on an internal pool of money to facilitate R&D. The best ideas would then be assigned to the right talent to develop and launch them.

To manage the idea flow, the company should appoint a high-level executive to be the Idea Captain. He or she should have an Idea Committee with representation from each major department. Everyone in the company as well as in the partner companies should know the name, address, and e-mail of this committee and should be encouraged to send ideas to this committee. The Idea Committee should meet every few weeks to review and evaluate the ideas, putting them into three piles, from poor, to good, to great-sounding ideas. The great-sounding ideas are assigned to different committee members to report back. If the report is positive, then some money would be granted for further research and development. Those ideas that continue to look strong will be pushed through until they are either dropped or launched.

Everyone submitting an idea will be told of its fate. This would counter the belief that the committee isn’t interested in ideas. The strongest ideas that are eventually implemented successfully should carry recognition to the proposers with either money, vacations, or other rewards. Kodak, for example, pays $10,000 each year to its employees who have contributed top money-making or money-saving ideas. Another company gives back 10% of the savings or incremental profit to the proposing party or group.

Many of the best ideas will come from observing major shifts in the market environment, which consists of PESTE elements—

Political, Economic, Social, Technological, and Environmental. Here are ideas that have emerged from observing trends in each component:

* Political: A company observes the difficulty of conducting accurate elections with paper ballots and invents a foolproof electronic voting machine.

* Economic: A company notes the high price of hotel rooms in Tokyo and invents a hotel that rents berths, not rooms, at a low price.

* Social: A company notices the difficulty of singles meeting new people and invents a dating service on the Internet.