While working on a global launch of a green household product, I had the opportunity to speak to the project chemist about the product's truly revolutionary ingredients.

"It’s incredible that you could come up stuff like this -- it’s so much less harmful for the planet, and works as well as the old stuff. How long did it take to develop it?’"I asked.

He answered nonchalantly "Oh, we’ve actually had this stuff for years. It’s nothing new."

"So why didn’t you introduce it years ago?" I asked.

With a shrug of his shoulders, he said "Because nobody asked us."

A simple statement; but pure gold to any business leader looking for green innovation and employee motivation.

Engagement is the mot du jour today. It's being pitched as a new religion, buoyed by the social media wave; however, behind all the hype is a remarkably simple concept: If you need help, ask.

Jeremy Osborn is an entrepreneur from Vancouver, Canada. His company -- Good Energy Research -- builds software that helps corporations deepen engagement with staff, customers, and the general public.

His tool, in his own words, "closes the loop between top down decision making and grassroots innovation." And it seems to be getting the attention of green innovators -- Osborn's software is about to launch as the behavior change component of a workplace greening campaign run by the David Suzuki Foundation.

Worker engagement can be more than an idea pipeline for getting green innovation. When done properly, it can create tremendous goodwill among your staff, which ripples outward to create wonderful PR.

For example, Walmart's well-publicized greening had employee engagement as one of its central tenets. By introducing the concept of Personal Sustainability Pledges, (PSPs), Walmart engaged staffers to create their own health or sustainability initiatives. In the words of the New York Times, "…the initiative could improve employee morale, and therefore productivity; reduce healthcare spending on a workforce with higher rates of heart disease and diabetes than the general public; and improve Walmart’s reputation with the image-conscious consumers it is courting with costlier merchandise."