Every strategic innovation begins with setting goals and objectives. It’s important that they are ambitious yet achievable.
Providing clarity of objectives across an organisation ensures that all employees are aligned to the same goals, and are therefore establishing a clear vision for the future that everyone can collectively work towards.
You can read more about how to define your innovation goals here.
In this post, we will tell you more about how to reach them!
Using Innovation Challenges to reach your innovation goals
Innovation Challenges broadcast an organisation’s desire for contributions to key strategic, goal-aligned topics. They are a clear and compelling way to harness the collective brainpower of your organisation to solve specific business problems or capture opportunities.
A successful Challenge will help to focus the creative powers of your colleagues around a specific issue.
- Challenges motivate engagement and collaboration, ensuring that you get only the most promising ideas in your funnel from the start.
- Internal Challenges harness the brainpower within your organisation.
- In external Challenges, customers, partners, suppliers and the general public get involved in finding solutions.
Using idea management software to run Innovation Challenges
Idea Drop’s idea management software streamlines the process of gathering and organising ideas generated in response to your innovation goals and aligning ideas with your company’s strategic goals.
Our clients’ experiences confirm our research findings, that consistently posting Innovation Challenges that are aligned with business goals drives strategic ideation. New Challenges continue to bring team members to the platform for ongoing interactions.
And through the process, employees become intrapreneurs, delivering a constant stream of new business ideas and revenue opportunities for your organisation.
“I see Idea Drop producing a better environment in which to work [and] making it better for the people we serve. We take note of every single suggestion - it’s important to listen to everyone’s viewpoints.”
Examples of what our clients are trying to achieve through Innovation Challenges:
- Incremental innovations are small enhancements or adaptations to a product or service that’s already in use.
- Radical innovations solve problems or address needs in wholly new ways or respond to problems and needs we didn’t know we had.
- Disruptive Innovation is a term coined by US academic Clayton Christensen. It refers to products, services and organisations that offer simpler, but effective, solutions to problems in order to reach poorly served markets more quickly.
- Architectural innovation (also known as ‘recombinative’ innovation) involves taking an approach, a technology or lessons from one field and applying it elsewhere.
How you can maximise your innovation results
- Every great innovation begins with an idea. Using the process of innovation goals framed as Challenge questions brings these crucial ideas into your organisation.
- Involve your most valuable asset – your employees. Because when every employee becomes engaged in your innovation process—in considering challenges, posting ideas and giving feedback—that asset is powerfully realised.
- The more users you have on the idea management platform, the deeper the engagement levels and the wider the pool of diverse ideas you can capture, evaluate and implement.
- Over the coming year, we encourage you to broadcast a consistent number of goal-aligned challenges (2-3 per month). This creates an environment of innovation seeking that can permeate your entire organisation.
- As part of your innovation best practices, use consistent, branded Challenge campaigns with recognisable and striking images, senior stakeholder sponsorship, the provision of detailed context, and the inclusion of deadlines.
- And have clear Challenge categories that are aligned with your strategic goals.
- Idea Drop is here to ensure innovation is driving your business forward and maximising the assets you already have within your teams.
