STRONG LEADERSHIP is the cornerstone of a successful innovation culture. As an innovation sponsor, you are responsible for the program that drives brand extension, differentiation, revenue growth, profitability, enhanced collaboration, sustainability, or process improvements.
An introduction to Challenge based innovation
Planbox combines strategy/design consulting, program management and an enterprise software platform to make collaborative innovation an everyday aspect of your organization. Challenge-based competitions for ideas and solutions are at the heart of our methodology: Sponsor led, focused, time-limited, and iterative.
Planbox is deployed as a scalable Software-as-a-Service platform. Once the innovation Sponsor has defined a proper problem or opportunity, the Challenge is targeted at a specific community of participants – inside or outside your enterprise – to generate ideas, proposals, and possibilities for answers, then to engage in collaborative behavior with each other.
Planbox is not a suggestion box – it instead promotes collaboration by connecting participants (employees inside; experts in communities outside) at all levels and allows them to participate in an innovation culture by submitting and shaping ideas. As the sponsor, you will oversee the development of the Challenge, the appointment of the review team, and the actions taken on selected ideas. The sponsor also brings resources to the project or presents a clear path to the resources so ideas may be acted upon.
How to influence positive outcomes
- Shape the problem, and outline goal statements
Make yourself available to inspire, brief and scope the innovation team at the start. Look through the ideas as they come in and if you’re not getting what you’d hoped for, tell that to the team. Outline your expectations early and often. - Provide implementation resources
One of the fastest ways to kill an innovation program is to ask for ideas/contributions and do nothing with them. To go from ideas to exploration to deployment, proper implementation resources are required to achieve desired outcomes. It is the sponsor’s top duty to secure resources. - Be active and engaged in the topic
Put your name on communications, talk about the effort in staff meetings, take the message company-wide, or announce it in external messages to your open communities. Publicly recognize those who make it successful.
Your Roles as Sponsor
- Be the Strategist
Employees need to understand why innovation, why now, why it’s important. Develop a list of talking points and use similar messaging as you explain the strategy, so the message is repeated multiple times in multiple formats. For example: - Innovation is critical to our continued success and it must set us apart from our competitors. - Innovation is a core capability at our company. - It’s not someone else’s job to innovate. No one department can make innovation happen. - Be the Leader
Communicate the effort with frequent, high impact messages, and provide an environment where people are comfortable trying new ways of working and bring up “crazy” ideas or unpopular topics. Participate in Challenges - commenting on employees’ ideas is particularly impactful. Ensure everyone that the resources are available to implement. Once the journey starts, stick with it and expect the leaders of the organization to support the efforts, ideas, implementation, etc. This is most effectively done with metrics that mature over time. - Be the Change Agent
Recognize the efforts and the individuals –idea generators, reviewers, implementation, communications team. Recognize the tangible results as well as what we’ve learned along the way about ourselves and about our company. Evaluate and adjust metrics to continuously provide stretch goals – and celebrate when they’re achieved.