  From Paul Williams BRAND AUTOPSY blog...good advice about utilizing the amazing brain power from employees, co-workers, family and friends: I’m seventy pages into Ideas Are Free and I’m enamored with all I have read. After reading Free Prize Inside and learning how Seth Godin views soft innovations (small ideas) as a catalyst for making things happen, I have found Ideas Are Free to be an advanced course in Free Prize-ology. The authors of Ideas Are Free , Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder, make a compelling case for how employee-generated ideas enable a company to experience transformative change and enduring success. Notable passages from the initial seventy pages include: Ideas are free . Employees become allies in solving problems, spotting opportunities, and moving the company forward, to the benefit of all.
And when managers decide to let their employees think alongside them – and no longer seek to go it alone – they will have joined the Idea Revolution. This empowerment starts a virtuous cycle. As employees see their ideas being used, they begin to feel valued as part of the team and become more involved. Small ideas are the best source of big ideas. A big problem or opportunity frequently manifests itself through a host of smaller signs or symptoms, each of which might be seen individually by different people in different places at different times. What might seem to be a small idea could in fact be addressing a facet of this larger issue. This bigger issue can often be discovered by probing with the right questions.
Small ideas tend to stay proprietary, since there are no mechanisms for competitors to find out about them, and even if they do, the ideas are often situation-specific and so cannot be copied. Because of their proprietary nature, they accumulate into a considerable cushion of sustainable competitive advantage. In case you are wondering what my Dog-Ear Score is so far … it’s 21.4%. Yep, I’ve dog-eared 15 of the first 70 pages. That’s a fast pace to start any book. 
