Challenge-Led Innovation
When implemented appropriately, challenge-led innovation can:
- solve organisational challenges
> by engaging diverse, dispersed groups of people, rapidly and cheaply; - create a stream of supported, high-value new ideas
> utilising the tension between bottom-up collaboration and strategically driven goals;
- increase engagement in your organisation
> enabling different types of people to contribute their key strengths, valuing both the generators of new ideas and those that refine them.
We use two primary methods to help our clients implement challenge-led innovation campaigns and to build their own challenge-led innovation capability:
- Facilitated challenge workshops
We create and facilitate temporary, cross-disciplinary, senior groups to rapidly solve specific organisational challenges using our proprietary, problem-solving methods. In parallel we also help our clients develop the capability to repeat this process themselves, and to integrate the outputs of such workshops into their organisation's innovation process.
- On-line challenge campaigns
We deliver tailored, challenge-led innovation campaigns that help large networks of geographically dispersed people, or focused, expert groups, to collaboratively and rapidly solve challenges in secure on-line spaces. Our process is time-limited, which drives participation whilst not distracting from day-to-day work, and is scalable, in terms of the size of the challenge and the size of the participating group.
The success of both challenge-led innovation methods depends on three key factors:
- A proven, systematic process
A process that has been tried and tested to facilitate the generation and capture of people’s ideas and the collaborative environment for rapid development, review and selection.
- A carefully designed challenge
A challenge must meet a clearly defined need within the organisation. It must have buy-in from the appropriate mix of participants, and senior sponsors must commit to acting upon the outputs of the process.
- Expert facilitation.
Without appropriate facilitation, problem-solving workshops and on-line collaborative tools lose focus or fail to gain traction, experience in delivering challenge-led innovation is essential.
Our consultants have designed and/or executed challenge-led innovation to deliver a number of objectives, including:
- the creation of growth strategies for disruptive technologies,
- the redesign of innovation process, reducing the cycle time of new product, service and process development,
- business process re-engineering, resulting in mass cost-reduction and
- crowd-sourcing for the front-end of innovation, to significantly accelerate the scanning and discovery process.