Innovation tournaments
“Many business have been trained to try to eliminate variability, driving toward highly consistent, repeatable outputs (…) It also happens to be the wrong way to think about innovation (…) Although randomness and serendipity clearly underlie the fate of any particular opportunities (…) an innovation tournament can introduce professional rigor to the innovation process.”
Innovation Tournaments by Christian Terwiesch and Karl T. Ulrich. Harvard Business Press, 2009.
A couple of years ago I blogged about enterprise programs such as Yahoo’s Brickhouse process and IBM’s Innovation Jam as examples of corporate initiatives reaching out to all employees for the purpose of growing the pool of innovative product concepts.
Back in the nineties I participated in Honeywell’s Futurist Competition, being fortunate enough to be one of the four European finalists awarded scholarships for graduate studies in the U.S. And, at the time of writing this post, I’m getting ready to join Alcatel-Lucent’s Entrepreneurial Boot Camp, which I am involved in as semifinalist and finalist for two different projects. The following video discusses this program:
As stated in C. Terwiesch and K.T. Ulrich’s book, innovation tournaments create abundant raw material and often comprehend multiple rounds of screening. As an example, Honeywell’s competition handled more than 1000+ project submissions in the first round. These were first screened by local panels in each country. The European final was held in The Hague and just involved about 20 of us.
This kind of corporate tournaments attract individuals who are not only motivated enough to moonlight, but also to take the risk of spending personal time and efforts despite of the odds. Good ideas and persistence alone is not enough: being able to make a case and effectively communicate the value of the project can be a decisive factor.
The competition’s objectives and screening criteria yield a funnel of projects which are either aligned with the company’s strategy or deliver out of the box initiatives leading to new growth… or both.
J. de Francisco blogging from Santa Monica, California, on Sep 25
