Recently, regular Forbes Contributor Michelle Greenwald took a moment to reflect on how companies are responding to the call to innovate and drive forward their business objectives by creating the internal role of Chief Innovation Officer. Tasked with maximizing the company’s innovation, Michelle notes that the Chief Innovation Officer looks to achieve their goals by creating an internal innovation team (what we might call a ‘Center of Excellence’), crowdsourcing ideas both internally and externally, and then working with business unit stakeholders to manage and prioritize ideas to outcomes.
The article goes on to discuss how leading companies such as P&G, Unilever and Lego manage their innovation program and increase awareness by creating “Challenges” to crowdsource ideas. At Brightidea, we also employ this practice – Challenges are specific topics that the company is looking for ideas, insights, and solutions in response. Challenges are typically time-boxed and communicated broadly across multiple business units in order to crowdsource solutions. From our years of experience working with companies in innovation program development, we find that these time-boxed Challenges are highly effective in keeping participants engaged and focused on delivering innovation program outcomes.
To learn more about how P&G, Unilever and Lego are structuring their innovation Challenges, read the full article on Forbes.
To learn more about Brightidea challenges and results, check out our case studies.
