The Swiss Mobiliar sources their ideas mostly internally. Alike idea-driven organizations, they currently focus on bottom up ideas and aim to improve their core business. This is shown by a large ongoing project and the re-launch of their idea management (05.2018), which includes idea coaches and an IT tool called SMARTis. Within one year, their employees generated 250 ideas and the steps of the idea management process after the idea submission are properly elaborated. However, they have no evidence about which factors lead their employees to contribute to the first step idea generation.

This led to the research question “How can the Swiss Mobiliar empower their employees towards becoming idea generators?” and the elaboration of respective important factors. The analysis was structured on a common empowerment concept (ability, willingness, allowance) and empirically conducted. The literature's empowerment factors built the conceptual framework, which was adapted by interviewing internal and external idea management experts. An online survey with 383 Swiss Mobiliar employees revealed the importance of the remaining factors, which set the base to answer the research question.

The employee empowerment concept for the bottom-up ideas at the Swiss Mobiliar reveals that the most crucial factors appear at the beginning and end of the idea management process and are dependent on the company culture: Factors of step "Idea generation": -Meaningfulness and awareness of the idea management -Timely space besides daily work -User friendly process Factor of step "Idea evaluation/implementation": -Idea implementation probability Factors of company culture: -Failure acceptance -Open feedback -Neutral authority levels Among those, there are two specifies to be considered: Firstly, most factors are only important as soon as the employee has submitted its first idea, unless meaningfulness and failure culture. Secondly, the employees’ characteristic groups revealed that the cultural factors are only important for the agency employees and the idea management is hardly known in the Ticino. Those findings are recommendable for an individualized application of the concept. To satisfy the important factors, the paper includes recommendable expert measures, which are available for immediate assessment for employee acceptance.