Innovation challenge

The keys to a successful innovation challenge

Innovation challenges are an excellent way to raise awareness about innovation among your stakeholders. They are quick to set up and provide the opportunity to gather new ideas, respond to a problem or identify promising initiatives to be rolled out across your organization.

Several key factors will ensure the success of your challenge:

• Measure your ROI: to monitor the results of your call for ideas, you should define the KPIs to be monitored throughout the challenge.
• Be transparent and inclusive: increase participation in the challenge by clearly communicating the goals of your ideation campaign to all target participants.
• Forget the suggestion box: choose a platform that is tailored to your needs and can be easily configured to optimize the user experience.
• Anticipate what comes after: make sure you have the resources you need to deliver winning projects.

Step 1: Design your challenge

This first stage is crucial to the success of your challenge. Before you start your campaign, make sure you define the following elements:

• The challenge's objectives

  Reduce your environmental impact, find new sources of growth, identify the best initiatives taken by your teams during the year... To ensure maximum participation in your challenge, your objectives must be aligned with your challenges and reflect the interests of your participants.

• The challenge's KPIs

  To measure the success of your challenge, you first need to define the KPIs you want to monitor throughout the process. There can be many different KPIs: number of participants involved, volume of ideas collected, turnover generated by winning ideas, etc.

• The terms of the challenge

  To ensure the success of your innovation challenge, you need to define 6 key elements in advance: the target audience, the themes of your challenge, the stages and milestones, the reward model for the winners, the communication plan to be used and the follow-up of the ideas to be implemented after the challenge.

• The challenge's governance

  Like any project, the launch of a challenge requires optimal organization. To ensure that your project runs smoothly, you need to identify the stakeholders and define their roles and responsibilities.

Step 2: Gather as many ideas as possible

The time has come for your participants to submit ideas, either individually or in teams. Here are our 3 tips for getting as many ideas as possible:

• 1. An optimized submission phase

  To ensure the participation of your target audience, you need to make it easy for them to submit their ideas online. Typically, a form is provided to your contributors. To ensure the quality of submissions, the form is 100% customizable. Yumana goes one step further, using intelligent analysis of submitted ideas to help you categorize similar ideas and identify and remove duplicate ideas.

• 2. Multidisciplinary teams to develop the idea

  To ensure that an idea is developed all the way through to implementation, your participants need to build teams that are ready to take action. To identify the best team members, Yumana provides idea owners with the 'Magic Team Builder', which suggests the most relevant profiles with just one click.

• 3. Feedback for all contributors

  To get quick feedback on the relevance of their idea, idea owners have two options:

  • They can either self-assess by completing the scoring grid designed for the challenge and get their score in real time,
  • Or they can ask for feedback to assess the value of their idea. Darwin, Yumana's AI, gives live advice on how to improve the relevance of the idea.

Step 3: Assess and select the best ideas

You've launched your innovation challenge and collected hundreds of ideas. To assess the potential value of the ideas you collected and be sure to keep only the best, you have several options:

• Use scorecards to define your own evaluation criteria

  To quickly select high potential ideas that meet your own scoring criteria, Yumana allows you to create 100% customizable scorecards.

• Give your communities the right to vote

  By opting for public voting, you give decision-making power back to your communities and maximize their engagement. You have two options: give each user an equal number of votes or gamify the session by enabling crowdfunding. Each user can then place as many bets as they like on the ideas and earn additional voting tokens based on their participation.

• Call on communities of experts

  Depending on the topic of your ideation challenge, it may be necessary to involve business experts in the evaluation of ideas. The platform provides managers with fully customizable evaluation grids. They can then call on the appropriate experts based on their skills, a group they belong to, or on an individual basis.

Step 4: Bring out the added value of ideas

Once the best ideas have been pre-selected, the nominated teams must go through a preparation phase to fine-tune their idea. This phase is an opportunity for the nominees to practice for the pitch phase, which follows a two-stage schedule:

• 1. Training your team’s basic pitching skills

  This first stage outlines the expectations of the jury that will select the best ideas. The training is designed to give nominees the tools to clarify their value proposition and the golden rules for writing an effective pitch. It also prepares nominees for public speaking and potential questions from the jury.

• 2. One-to-one team coaching

  Once the candidate teams are familiar with the different pitch procedures, they are required to go through a one-to-one coaching phase. This stage ensures that the quality of the ideas presented to the jury is consistent, regardless of the experience of the candidates.

  The coaching will have been successful if each idea clearly formalizes the following information:

  • The problem addressed by the proposed idea
  • The context in which the problem is addressed
  • The solution to the problem and the expected benefits
  • The action plan to bring the project to fruition

Step 5: Celebrate your talents according to their contribution

Your innovation challenge is drawing to a close: it's time to select the best ideas and reward the winners.

• Organizing a closing ceremony

  This ceremony is an opportunity for the organizers and participants of the challenge to celebrate the success of the innovation challenge together, whether face-to-face or remotely. It is the opportunity to reward all those involved.

• Promote the award winners on your platform

  Central to the organization of your challenge, the platform plays an important role for both managers and participants. Don't forget to update it once the winners have been chosen:

  • Highlight the winners on the front page to encourage participants to learn more about the winning projects;
  • Inform all participants with a dedicated message and thank them for their participation.