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To encourage innovation, make it a competition

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by: Anil Rathi

The competition format has fueled major successesin business. Fortune 500 companies like AT&T and American Express often sponsor online creativity contests to inspire innovation among their customers, while Kickstarter and other crowdfund platforms have ideas compete to win funding. And organizations can also use competitions to drive innovation within their own workforces.

For example, Thompson Reuters createda “catalyst fund”to encourage and supportnew ideas. To access it, teams of employees compete by presenting and defending their most compelling ideas to an innovation investment committee. The Department of Health and Human Services also recently launcheda “Shark Tank”-style competitionwhere multiple employee teams compete to pitch their best ideas to senior officials.

However, while internal competitions may sound easy enough to deploy, there are key design and management principles to consider if you want them to yield good ROI. Having helped over two hundred companies and large organizations deploy internal and external competitions, we’ve found four elements that will lead to success:

Frame the competition around a specific need. “Design the next big thing” is not a good challenge statement.

Jordan Rumsey