the grab bag

parking lot February 9, 2009

First of all…it has been a good long while since I’ve posted here. That’s not good. But I’m back. Let’s see if I can keep this more consistent.

Okay, back to your regularly scheduled blog topic.

I work in an environment where there are many, many ideas floating around. In fact, it’s one of my responsibilities to help foster an environment that encourages this. Combine a wealth of very creative brains with a new structure for brainstorming this year (another discussion altogether…stand by for a post on that in the near future) and what you’ve got is a pile of ideas. Some are great, some are going to be great. A few we use immediately, most we don’t. So the challenge we’ve had for a while now is this: what do we do with all of those great ideas that we can’t use right now? And is there a way to make them accessible for our entire department?

What we came up with is a project that I’ve been chipping away at for several months.  It files, describes and categorizes ideas. It’s a blog. It’s called the EBC Parking Lot.

Each post is different idea. Each one has a category that people can search by. And if the idea is inspired by something that can be displayed visually or even linked to, it can show it right there in the body of the post (perfect for embedding video). We even have a way that someone can submit an idea right there on the blog by submitting a comment.

I’m pretty excited about launching this thing soon. I think it’s a slick way of keeping these ideas organized and at people’s fingertips. But like every innovative thing, the proof will be in the pudding.

Check it out and tell me what you think.