How should Burk and Kramer go about determining whether the current suite of creativity-enhancing activities and facilities are the best ones?
Brian Kramer and Gordon Burk should definitely listen to what their employee think about the creativity-enhancing activities and facilities. Since, there is no hard evidence offered that any of these activities actually lead to useful new ideas. Each of the employees that participate should be ask for some feedback about these activities they are doing. Also, the activities themselves need to be looked at carefully to determine what can be done to make it more effective. Employees are the most important as well as the most reliable resources at Critical Mass. Some sort of metrics like anonymus surveys could be an efficient and discrete manner to assess which of the activities are the best ones.
Should any of the current approaches be discontinued? Should new ones be added?
It will be important to look over the survey results and listen to what the employees have to say on the current approaches. Methods for encouraging creative thinking and innovation, like wiki’s, writing widget and developing application, have worked in other companies.