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Recent press articles have focussed on how the big players like Yahoo are losing revenues to the likes of Google and other new comers. My suspicion is that this is to do with remuneration schemes. When Yahoo first started out, I imagine they were a small start up, with very bright individuals getting paid smallish salaries plus stock options. As the company grew these options became very valuable and thus the need to be creative was inbuilt into the first wave or two of employees. Google still has this structure for many of its key employees and thus the urge to be creative and build revenues is more focussed than at Yahoo, which has become large and unwieldy enough to stop any additional remuneration for new ideas being earth shatteringly large.

Whilst the above is conjecture I suspect that anyone reading it from Google or Yahoo would probably be nodding their head as they read. The guys at Google will obviously be trying to avoid falling into the same trap whilst they need to keep innovating, whilst I suspect the Yahoo team are wondering how they can get back to a point where they will pay sufficiently well for new ideas that their employees are encouraged to innovate.

The difficulty is also plain to see in more traditional businesses. I work for a Life Insurance company and prior to this worked in Banking.  In both industries suggestion schemes are the norm, but tend to carry token payments or rewards for new ideas as opposed to any share of the generated profits.

Taking a theoretical example, someone I know well shares an idea with me that is brilliant and could generate millions of dollars worth of profits. My very first instinct is to protect the idea and make sure that my employer does not access it. The reason for this is that I believe my friend can make more money by taking the idea independently to a small player than either of us could benefit by taking the idea to my large employer.

Naturally my employer would be angry to know that this is the way I would react. I hold a fairly senior management position, but suspect that there are people in more senior positions who would react the same way. Note that my employer has written into my contract that any intellectual property developed whilst working for them belongs to them, which is a nice attempt to try and overcome the issue through aggression, however in my theoretical example the idea is not mine and I have done nothing to develop it, but clearly the company could benefit.

If I worked for a company such as Virgin, with a reputation for innovating in numerous industries including banking and insurance I might expect to be rewarded by being given shares in a new entity or by being paid to run the project concerned. In larger more traditional industries however the idea of setting up spin off units is usually frowned upon and considered to water down shareholder value.

My argument would be that the disincentive to innovate found in most large corporations is such that shareholders lose value every day. I have lost count of the number of executives who have told me that they have a secret idea which they hope will make them rich one day. If these executives were rewarded appropriately, surely they would come forward with their ideas and generate additional profits for the company? Certainly some more junior employees will put forward ideas in the hope of advancement up the corporate ladder, but when you are already above midway and earning a tidy sum you are a) more likely to be able to pitch the idea and carry it through to fruition, and b) less likely to put it forward because you understand the worth to the company versus the incremental value to the individual.

There is an analogy here with the sporting world. Many think that the money paid to sports stars in games such as football, basketball and soccer far outweighs the value that they bring to the world as a whole. Sports teams and organisations realised long ago however that without the incentives they were getting less than 100% in certain situations, which meant less crowd enjoyment and lower incomes throughout the league. Higher salaries and bigger incentives have lead to more creative play and stronger commitment from many athletes, which in turn have lead to higher $ values for gates, TV deals and advertising.

Should large business then go down the same road? Should we be developing our own superstars to innovate and generate ideas that will take our businesses forward? Is there a model possible where the guys who generate the most revenues for the firm share in that wealth directly, thus creating higher (not lower) value for their shareholders?

If you wish to comment please drop me a line using brad@ideas2earn.com . Fell free to copy this article if it is useful to you, but I would appreciate link back to my homepage at www.ideas2earn.com

casting. The system will prompt you to enter the groom's name (brad emery).

According to the experts one of the reasons that I am not getting many people sign up is because I do not have an offer for potential members. They can get all the ideas from the website and there is nothing in it for them to sign up. With this in mind I wrote a report entitled "Why you Need to start your own Business". It runs to about 3 pages and I have posted it to some article submission sites aswell to see whether it will drive more traffic.

So the question I have is why no-one signed up today? I guess that either I didnt put the offer prominantly enough on the page, ór I didn't put a time limit on it, or it simply isn't appealing to the people that viewed the page today, whcih incidentally was the best day yet for pure traffic flow.

I also managed to forget my user name for Miva the ad generating site having only signed up yesterday. Actually I think they have some work to do as the confirmation before you can use the site system meant that I just logged out yesterday and then today obviously can't remember the sign in details, and they didn't send a confirmation email with teh details in. I have written to them so hopefully they will be quick to resolve it.

Ah, I'm tired and bitching so will end this here.

I spent the last 4 days in Phuket in Thailand. I stayed at a major brand hotel and indeed they claimed to support wireless connectivity in their lobby if not in the rooms which were spread across a large area. Unfortunately when I got there I found out that the wireless connectivity didn't work, nor were we able (for some reason) to download my FTP program from the internet in the business centre.

My office emails are encrypted and only readable from the one machine, which meant automatically that I was out of touch with my work emails for 4 days. Given that this was supposed to be vacation time I figured I could live with this, but what about my website updates and daily emails?

Fortunately some advanced planning meant that I had all my files on a memory stick just incase. A short walk brought me to an internet cafe where I was readily able to download smart ftp and I had my set up details stored in my main email account which is webbased. I think it took me about 40 minutes from start to finish to update the website and send out the email. This was mainly because the pages had been pre-built prior to me leaving and just required a quick rename to become active.

I'd like to claim a major victory for planning around technology failures, but I still made some dumb mistakes and potentially upset a couple of subscribers who decided to unsubscribe whilst I was away. I have of course written and apologised and they seem to be ok.

I guess the morale is that we tend to take technology for granted but when it fails or simply isn't there some good planning can get around most issues. Even the problems I had could have been resolved with a little more thought before departure.