Creating a Competition for Innovation
Promoting a culture of innovation is no easy matter. One problem is that creativity is not equally distributed among team members and bursts of insight don’t happen on schedule.
Getting team members to innovate and think creatively is not something leaders can mandate. Even crafting processes to promote innovation inside organizations has been shown to be a bust. Innovation cannot be structured or directed by leaders.
But that doesn’t mean leaders can’t encourage it.
As it turns out, the best way to promote innovation is to ask team members to compete for it. Leaders who create contests for new ideas not only discover important new practices and product ideas but get the entire organization thinking about how to contribute innovatively. Challenging the team to create ideas to make current processes more efficient and to generate insights for new products and services gets the ball rolling.
Contests that work best have several qualities that are not common sense. Research has shown that offering one grand prize for the best innovation results in only a small number of team members engaged in the hunt for novel, practical, and useful ideas. While a grand prize fosters excitement, offering several smaller but valuable rewards encourages more participation across the enterprise.
Because “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” it really matters who judges the quality of the ideas. Best practice is not to have the most senior leaders judge the utility and value of the ideas. Instead, turn to peers to make the evaluations.
Those who sit in the same seats as those executing in the day-to-day will possess a deeper understanding of what ideas will work and add significant value to the organization. Better yet, junior managers and peers as evaluators will also increase participation as team members don’t feel as if senior leaders will judge them harshly for a wild idea.
The frequency of contests depends on how many ideas the organization can absorb and execute. The good news is that no matter how often an organization asks team members to compete, an innovation mentality often takes hold and produces fresh ideas across the enterprise.
When innovation is prized, team members bring their creativity to every problem and opportunity. They recognize that the real contest is to make the organization better.
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I've found that the value in a prize is often in the recognition itself. If you don't have a budget for a prize that would be considered grand, you might find as much competitive juices with something that comes across like a homemade trophy, but carries the recognition with a lot of respect.
Might I recommend a ranked-choice voting system be what you use if you turn it over to the team population to be your judges. Counting up total scores by having everyone judge and rank the top 5 comes out with a more qualified and apolitical winner than having everyone just select the top one.