Innovation Competition – Promoting a culture of innovation, why not?

When the world is gradually moving to a digital economy, businesses always need to innovate and develop, otherwise, they will lag behind and become eclipsed. One of the effective ways to get yourself breakthrough innovation ideas is to organize competitions: internal and external.

Build a culture of innovation with internal competition

In a 2017 Harvard Business Review article, Anna Steinhage, Dan Cable, and Duncan Wardley talk about the impact of competition in a workplace. They described how hosting an internal challenge can generate creative results and inspire collaboration or it can create unethical behaviors and cutthroat rivalry.

The authors articulate the difference between these two potential outcomes: does the employee feel fear or excitement? If the employee feels afraid, they are more likely to take aggressive (and potentially unscrupulous) action whereas if a participant feels excited, they are more likely to generate positive and creative results.

The authors recommend that the best way to keep competitions positive is to highlight strengths and celebrate wins rather than threatening loss or deriding “losers.” This is even moreso the case when a company launches an innovation competition, where the risk of failure is high. If an organization creates a competition that celebrates winners as well as failures (or as some call them “lessons learned”) and highlights unique opportunities for winners rather than penalizing those who don’t win, organizations find themselves in the unique position of not only identifying some great new ideas but also improving workplace culture.

Treasures of ideas from the outside

However, internal resources are not always filled with ideas. Instead of just focusing on internal resources as before, the era requires businesses to constantly look for new ideas and creative solutions from outside, including customers, suppliers, and start-ups. Therefore, enterprises need to become proactive, adaptive and focus on activating and expanding the open innovation ecosystem.

Open innovation is a concept first introduced in the book “Open Innovation: The New Necessity to Create and Profit from Technology” by Professor Henry W. Chesbrough of the University of California (UCL). Berkeley, USA). According to Professor Chesbrough, Open innovation is the use of knowledge flows from the outside in and from the inside out to promote internal innovation and open markets to the outside while applying innovation.

In which, organizing a contest or a place to find many creative solutions to business problems is a wise and effective decision. It is becoming a trend that helps businesses shape their development while responding to changes in the needs of society with a rich treasure of ideas.

Idea contest process

Wolters Kluwer is a Dutch company that is a global provider of professional information, software solutions and services for professionals, and they offer an excellent template for organizations looking to launch a purposeful and positive innovation competition. Wolters Kluwer serves customers in over 180 countries, maintains operations in over 40 countries, and employs approximately 19,200 people worldwide. With that global network of wide-ranging in specialties, they have a huge opportunity to leverage the collective domain knowledge of their workforce, which is why Wolters Kluwer has been running their Global Innovation Awards for the past ten years—a cross-company competition encouraging the development and implementation of innovative solutions from within. 

It’s not just a great employee engagement exercise—75% of the suggested ideas are implemented and adopted across Wolters Kluwer. And the work shows, Wolters Kluwer regularly wins awards for its innovation performance. Here’s how it works:

• Wolters Kluwer opens the GIA (Global Innovation Awards) to every employee in one of three categories: Adjacencies, Game Changers, and Internal Improvement.
• Each category has defined criteria and assigned weights. Ideas are reviewed and filtered in the first stage gate by the Divisions.
• Initial evaluations are cross-calibrated in a second Stage Gate with Divisional and Functional leads. They have the difficult task of shortlisting 15-18 finalists This helps cross-pollinate ideas across Wolters Kluwer leads and at times they even combine two different complementary submissions into a more compelling single submission.
• The competition culminates in a day-long pitch session with an external panel of experts along with the Wolters Kluwer CEO to select the winners.

The mood of celebration on that final day and the chance to win recognition for a great idea (rather than lose out for not identifying a good idea), keeps the spirit of the event positive and has genuinely led to numerous improved products, processes, and offerings across the company.

BambuUP’s Innovation Challenge Hub – An Innovation Market

BambuUP is an Innovation Platform born with a mission: Make it easy for businesses everywhere to access and participate in the Innovation process. BambuUP helps to establish relationships between Innovative Solution Providers and Innovative Solution Seekers, nurturing a comprehensive startup ecosystem that co-creates and develops.

 BambuUP has developed an Open Innovation Challenge Hub – a field for Enterprises/Organizations to showcase their key challenges and seek specific solutions from our talented Innovation Providers (starups, experts,…).

Currently, BambuUP’s Challenge Hub is opening opportunities for potential startups to step into the playground and solve problems in the Challenge Room from the “big guys” such as: Sunhouse, CMC, BFC, Masan Meatlife,…

The “playgrounds” are opening applications, waiting for startups to join. Seize the opportunity to connect with Businesses to breakthrough NOW: https://bambuup.com/innovation-challenge-hub