All revenue growth starts with an idea.

All revenue growth starts with an idea. The idea could be for a new product or a new service. Or it can be an addition to a product or a service that already exists. Or it can be an idea that begins as almost idle speculation - "I wonder what would happen if...."

Employees, from the rawest recruits to crusty veterans of the business, have ideas, and many of them have the potential to help the enterprise. The leadership challenge is to have a social process that helps draw them out. After all, those ideas don't do your company any good if people won't voice them.

The social engine can help, of course. The interactions among the various departments - marketing and R&D, for example, or customer services and sales - will spark more ideas worth pursuing.

Your organization doesn't need to wait for the proverbial light-bulb to go on in order to come up with new ideas. Innovation can be operationalized. You can develop a process that you can follow to surface ideas and then, develop as many growth ideas as possible.

Unlike cost-cutting, growing revenues requires innovation. Many people think only geniuses can innovate. And, indeed, genius is always welcom. However, innovation is a social process and everyone can participate. Once the process is firmly integrated into the way the company does business every day, you will find more and more geniuses coming out of the woodwork.

Silicon Valley is filled with geniuses. But if you look at the successful entrepreneurs who work there, you will discover a curious thing. The vast majority of them worked - often for a long time - at established firms before going off on their own. Part of the attraction, of course, in starting their own companies was the freedom and equity ownership that come along as part of the deal. But another reason for leaving had to do with the fact that their old companies just could not accommodate them and what they wanted to do. Had their former employers handled the social innovation process better, a certain percentage of those entrepreneurs would have stayed and probably contributed in a big way to the growth of their former company.

How can you turn innovation into profitable growth?