Challenges are the best way to quickly drive participation and results in Brainstorm.  A challenge is a “call for ideas” for a specific pain point or strategic area that you face.  For example, you could challenge your people to “Eliminate $10 million in supply chain inefficiencies” or “Help our customers to get out of debt” or anything else that might be pertinent to your organization.  You get to focus the collective brainpower of your people on the issues that matter to you.  The results can be surprising.

Why do Challenges work?

They reduce the barriers that normally face innovation.  The folks innovating have an easier time coming up with ideas because there are guardrails.   It’s easier to respond to a prompt than to come up with something out of thin air.  For those managing the challenge, they have a vested interest in the outcome.  The ideas aren’t just ideas.  They are solutions to a specific problem that matters to those managing the challenge.  These two factors combine to result in more ideas and a higher chance of implementation.

How do I create a successful challenge?

Make it focused and specific.  The danger with broad-based challenges is that the submissions can be all over the place.  You end up with results that are more of a scattershot and less like a laser.  The scattershot covers a large area, but doesn’t necessarily have much impact.  The laser, on the other hand, is concerned with a much smaller area, but has significant impact.  Providing focus in the definition of your challenge (clear scope, tangible outcomes, quantitative goals) can help your participants to focus their brainpower on the area you want to impact.

Define the problem for high impact innovation.  One problem we see is when challenge creators define the problem with a specific set of solutions in mind. If you state a challenge as ‘create a sharper razor blade,’ you have to be sure that you’re really looking for something that has to do with blades and with sharpness. A ‘sharper blade’ may be what customers asked for, but it’s important to understand the measurable outcome they’re really looking for.  If that outcome is ‘minimize how often i have to shave’ and you define the problem that way, then your community can come up with some serious breakthrough innovation.  Heck, they could even invent electrolysis, which could solve the problem well even though it has nothing to do with blades or sharpness.

Tell people why it matters.  It’s important to get across why this is a priority for your organization.  Why does it matter?  What is riding on having a better solution?  If you can also express why existing solutions fail, you’ll help more folks get down a productive path towards high impact solutions.

Be clear about what you’re looking for from participants.  This will save time for both you and your participants.  Putting in the effort up front will lead to submissions that are more relevant to what you’re looking for. 

Promote the challenge.  You need to get people’s attention if they’re ever going to participate in your challenge.  As with any marketing effort, the more people you can reach and the more times you can reach them, the more likely it is that you’ll generate awareness.  Common tactics include:

• Emailing a description and link to the challenge to internal distribution lists
• Using the Share feature in Brainstorm to share the challenge with specific people or those with a specific interest or skill (i.e. “innovation”)
• Announcing the challenge during a large team meeting
• Creating banners or posters that can be hung in heavily trafficked areas
• Having a more senior leader send out a message about the challenge to a wide audience

Follow through on what you say you’ll do.  If you say the top two ideas are going to be funded as a result of your challenge, make sure to do that.  Or, if something happens to prevent you from doing that, clearly communicate with participants your reasons why.  Arguably the most critical aspect of a healthy innovation community is that community’s belief that its efforts will result in action.  Having clear next steps engages people, as they know some ideas (even if not theirs) will see the light of day.  If that belief becomes undermined by dashed expectations, the community will become less vibrant and your innovative output will be diminished. 

Next:  Creating Your Challenge