{"id":243,"date":"2009-04-21T16:02:11","date_gmt":"2009-04-21T22:02:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/workingknowledge.com\/blog\/?p=243"},"modified":"2023-03-02T21:29:00","modified_gmt":"2023-03-03T03:29:00","slug":"innovation-by-contest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.workingknowledge.com\/blog\/innovation-by-contest\/","title":{"rendered":"Innovation by Contest"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Point<\/strong>: Companies can encourage innovation through employee contests <\/p>\n<p><strong>Story<\/strong>: The <a href=\"http:\/\/workingknowledge.com\/blog\/?p=236\">previous post<\/a> on Harrah&#8217;s Entertainment generated some great discussion, particularly around EMC&#8217;s &#8220;innovation-by-contest&#8221; as one approach to generating innovations. Some companies (e.g., Harrah&#8217;s, <a href=\"http:\/\/workingknowledge.com\/blog\/?p=173\">HP<\/a>) use themes to guide their employee-submitted innovations, and some companies (e.g., EMC) do not. <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/workingknowledge.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/karlulrich3-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"Wharton Professor Karl Ulrich\" title=\"karlulrich3\"  align=\"right\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-244\" \/> This prompted me to ask Wharton Professor <a href=\"http:\/\/opim.wharton.upenn.edu\/~ulrich\/\">Karl Ulrich<\/a>, author of the forthcoming <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/1422152227\/ref=s9_sims_gw_s1_p14_t1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&amp;pf_rd_s=center-2&amp;pf_rd_r=1BEAF0EM9GNTXVH4ERQN&amp;pf_rd_t=101&amp;pf_rd_p=470938631&amp;pf_rd_i=507846\"><em>Innovation Tournaments<\/em><\/a> (Harvard Business School Press, May 14, 2009) about his experiences with innovation contests.  In his book, Ulrich uses the metaphor of a tournament to explore how ideas vie for attention and resources during the innovation process. Ulrich&#8217;s central metaphor is that companies use figurative or literal tournaments to progressively filter incoming ideas through a series of hurdles or gates during research, development, and new product introduction.  At last week&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.silicon-flatirons.org\/index.php \">Silicon Flatirons<\/a>&#8216; conference, I asked Karl about his view on the theme-based approach compared to the wide-open approach for an innovation contest. Ulrich recommended a wide-open approach for the first phase, saying that the wide-open approach might show clusters of idea suggestions on a new topic. He cited a cosmetics manufacturer with whom he&#8217;s worked. The cosmetics manufacturer&#8217;s contest got a numerous unexpected suggestions for foundations (make-up) for young people &#8212; an new area that the company decided to explore further. He added that many companies mistakenly try to fund too many projects &#8212; not narrowing the funnel fast enough.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Action<\/strong>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Leverage employees&#8217; knowledge of markets or technologies to spawn unexpected revolutionary or evolutionary innovations (e.g., EMC&#8217;s contest)<\/li>\n<li>Cluster the wide-open ideas by similarity, to create or modify themes or spot unexpected opportunities<\/li>\n<li>Use employees&#8217; distributed knowledge to help focus attention on the best ideas (e.g., Harrah&#8217;s voting portal)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Companies can encourage innovation through employee contests. Leverage employees&#8217; knowledge of markets or technologies to spawn unexpected revolutionary or evolutionary innovations (e.g., EMC&#8217;s contest)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[71,5,11,34],"tags":[105,104,103,365,102,371],"class_list":["post-243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-case-study","category-how-to","category-innovation","category-strategy","tag-contest","tag-employees","tag-evaluation","tag-how-to","tag-idea-generation","tag-innovation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.workingknowledge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.workingknowledge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.workingknowledge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.workingknowledge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.workingknowledge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.workingknowledge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2290,"href":"http:\/\/www.workingknowledge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions\/2290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.workingknowledge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.workingknowledge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.workingknowledge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}