Continental developed an employee suggestion program way back in 1930. Nowadays, thousands of ideas are generated by employees and implemented within the corporation every year.

In June 2006, the Executive Board set out the aims of the Continental Idea Management (CIM) program in a policy guideline. In 2008, more than 350,000 ideas were submitted worldwide, of which almost 300,000 were put into effect. Based on the corporate units taking part in our Idea Management program, each employee submitted about three ideas/suggestions for improvement on average that year. This remarkable level of participation shows just how much potential there is in an effective Idea Management scheme, and how important it is to foster the creativity and innovative power of the employees. This also particularly applies in economically difficult times where the ideas of our employees help to improve workflows, processes and products, and help to save costs.

CIM is making a key contribution towards enhancing the competitiveness of our company. Ideas open up new possibilities for the future. Even many small improvements make a big impact overall.

The success of CIM is also underscored by the German Institute of Economics (Deutsches Institut für Betriebswirtschaft, or dib for short). Once a year, this institute conducts an idea management benchmark study (only German) among German companies operating in various branches of industry. In 2008, Continental AG came fourth out of a total of 20 surveyed companies with a work force of > 20,001.

Benchmark assessment by dib includes the following key performance indicators:

• Number of ideas implemented per employee
• Calculated savings per employee
• Rate of participation

The dib idea management analysis for 2008 also contained another component of evaluation for the first time. The “relative excellence” of the employee idea process was analyzed for each company, and is composed of the following:

• Rate of ideas generated
• Relative savings
• Processing time
• Conversion rate of ideas into projects

The “relative excellence” of Continental AG’s idea management process is much greater than the global and industry averages. More details can be found here (only German).