Thinking beyond the suits is thinking out of the box.

Creative ideas (yes, I am attributing the best ideas to creative ones) do indeed come from employees in various departments as they are often the ones who are most in touch with customers and thus know the work processes well.

Both top and bottom (and middle)

The best ideas can come from ANYWHERE. That's what makes it so hard to reel "best ideas" in.

I totally agree that your front line employees know the process and the external customers best. So those employees have that edge on idea generation.

But certainly a company with its founders (at the top) are generating and collecting and repackaging "best" ideas from themselves and those that they've brought in. Bill Hewlett and David Packard or Bill Gates and crew come to mind.

When a product/service is later in the life cycle/more mature and the founders are gone, then you can get apathy and just a big machine trudging along (at least for a while).

Someone at a higher level in the company has to actually want the "best ideas" too. You can certainly get a situation where a larger company is steeped in procedures, policies and rules and employees are told directly that they are hired "from the neck down"...OR...it is painfully obvious that ideas in the "idea box" dont really go any where.

On one page...this question magically says "from stock boys and clerks"...Hmmm...
Wierd bugs like that and not being able to change and save fields in the Vcard... continue to haunt this site...

The problem with this is, the management always try to pass it off as their own idea. if the low employee can't fight their corner, they often go unrewarded!

Sam Watson lived in an age of people-based systems - so I assume he meant the people working with the customer. Today we are getting beyond people-based systems - we tend to live in the flat world of the internet. In this new world it is the customer who has the best ideas BUT then you need a Steve Jobs or a Jeff Bezos to implement those ideas.

Sam Walton...too

Good ideas come from all levels, from the top to the bottom.

This quote is particularly interesting because when I worked at Wal-Mart as a "lower-level employee," no one could have cared less about any ideas I may have had.

People at any level of an organization can create solutions. What may lead to more quality solutions is closeness to customers or users. [Salespeople for example]
Consumers will tell you what they want if you ask them and listen to what they have to say. Then the individual employee [or group] may develop solutions for the consumer. Doing this successfully generally leads to delighted customers. The customer will gladly trade dollars for solutions.

Good ideas come from people who are allowed to understand where good ideas are needed.