Employee Involvement in Innovation as a Source of Sustained Competitive Advantage

The paper reports the results of a survey investigating the practices of idea management in Slovenian companies. Idea management is a formalized mechanism for the creation of inventions and their transformation into innovations in the widest range of employees – nonprofessional inventors, as a rule. The survey discusses factors influencing idea management and, consecutively, the invention-innovation capabilities of a company. Special attention is paid to organizational issues of idea management. The decentralized supervisor-managed system, where the predominant responsibility for implementing idea management is entrusted to each line manager, proves to be essentially more successful than the traditional, centrally-driven model.