Innovation challenges are time-bound calls for employees and other members of the innovation community to share ideas on specific priorities.
Innovation departments use challenges in various ways. We've seen companies ask employees to submit ideas for new products, or universities ask students to share ideas on improving campus life.
In order to run successful challenges that bring in high-quality ideas, innovation managers need to provide participants with the information required to fully understand each initiative.
This normally includes:
The objective: What's the end goal of the challenge, and who are you trying to reach with your innovation? Is the challenge product-oriented? Do you need to solve a specific problem? Or are you thinking about testing a new target market?
Additional background information (e.g., relevance of solving the challenge for the company, customer surveys, market data, or stakeholder interviews): These extra resources allow participants to learn more about the priority and understand the full context before replying with ideas. The more context they have about the priority, the higher-quality ideas they submit.
Who sponsors the challenge: By including details on who's sponsoring the challenge, whether it's the head of marketing or perhaps the CEO, participants gain context around why it's important to the company.
This article reviews five examples of well-constructed innovation challenges so you can see the context provided, the goals of each challenge, and the outcomes.
Delta Cafés — Challenge to launch new coffee products.
Rethinking Energy — Challenge to help companies accelerate the transition to green energy.
Mobily — Challenge to address societal priorities.
GIJIMA — Challenge for new mobile application ideas.
VU Impact Lab — Challenge to help students reconnect after returning from quarantine.
If you'd like to learn more about creating and managing successful innovation challenges, you can schedule a call with our team.
1. Delta Cafés
Delta Cafés (Grupo Nabeiro) is a Portuguese coffee roasting company that sells coffee beans, pods, capsules, and other coffee-related products. It's the largest coffee roasting company in Portugal and has expanded into 40 countries worldwide.
Objectives
One of Delta Cafés' core values is to be present in customers' lives, by creating new products designed for new consumers and new consumption moments.
This includes introducing new coffee blends, developing convenient coffee formats (such as capsules and ready-to-drink options), and leveraging technology to enhance the coffee-drinking experience. The company aims to anticipate consumer needs and trends, creating unique and enjoyable moments for coffee lovers.
So, for this challenge, Delta Cafés asked employees to share product ideas that explore new moments of consumption.
Information Inside the Challenge
Delta Cafés understood that to help employees generate high-quality product ideas, they had first to provide context on the current moments of consumption.
Inside this challenge:
Delta Cafés gave employees access to customer data that detailed all the different personas (students, working professionals, retirees, athletes, etc.).
They then expanded upon what products these personas consume the most (coffee beans, ready-to-drink iced coffee, coffee pods, etc.).
Finally, they showed employees what times of the day each persona consumed these products (morning, mid-morning, lunch, dinner, or after dinner).
This context allowed employees to identify new moments of the day where Delta Cafés could be present and propose product ideas to fill those gaps.
In addition to this data, Delta Cafés included a quote from the CEO about the priority's importance. This showed employees that sponsorship and leadership were behind the challenge, which spurred participation.
Results
Delta Cafés launched two products using ideas from this challenge: Go Chill and Croffee.
Go Chill: One employee suggested launching a coffee-flavored yogurt. However, as stakeholders shared their insights, they iterated upon the idea, and it turned into Go Chill, a ready-to-drink, chilled coffee. Since its launch, Go Chill has sold over 10 million units in Portugal alone.
Croffee: Another employee submitted an idea to launch a cereal bar containing caffeine. Instead of making coffee in the morning, students and busy professionals could simply grab a caffeine cereal bar before heading to class or work. So, Delta Cafés launched Croffee — a crunchy, coffee cereal bar with the same amount of caffeine as a shot of espresso.
2. Rethinking Energy by nlmtd and TNW
Rethinking Energy is an open innovation platform for the energy sector to solve the problems in the transition towards renewable energy. The platform was launched by nlmtd in partnership with TNW and runs on InnovationCast.
The goal of Rethinking Energy is to connect companies transitioning to green energy with startups, researchers, and energy sector professionals who already built proven solutions that solve the problems these companies face.
Companies can post challenges related to issues they encounter when adopting green energy, and these experts can promote their solutions.
This allows companies to save money and transition to green energy faster by leveraging existing technologies instead of building their own.
Objectives
Alliander, an energy distribution company based in the Netherlands, approached Rethinking Energy to source ideas on accelerating the move to green energy and maintaining their power grid more efficiently.
For this open innovation challenge, Alliander saw that their local power grids required increasingly expensive upgrades as they adopted green energy. They already spent €1.2 billion per year on upgrades, and they predicted that this number would only continue to rise.
In their current work processes, Alliander identified three areas that consumed a lot of resources:
Assembly of cable joints and plugs
Cable selection and identification during work execution
Installation of new power cables
So, Alliander called experts to submit ideas on cutting costs while still meeting the energy demands of consumers.
Information Inside the Challenge
Alliander gave participants an in-depth explanation of the DSOs (Distribution System Operators) they own in the Netherlands. They discussed how their network of primary substations links to 150 kV and 110 kV grids operated by TenneT, which, in turn, distributes power to medium-voltage distribution grids.
They also outlined how their high-voltage and low-voltage grid powers over three million households in the Netherlands. This context gave participants technical insight into how Alliander’s power grid works, so they could identify any inefficiencies and present innovative solutions.
Results
We can’t disclose the exact business ideas that Alliander collected during this challenge. However, we work together with partners from several European countries in their ambition to accelerate the energy transition and to expand their network to increase their impact and learning opportunity. Thanks to its flexible design, Rethinking Energy creates direct value for each partner individually, which increases as more partners join.
3. VU Impact Lab: Connected Campus Challenge
VU (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) is consistently ranked among the top universities globally. Their Center for Digital Innovation (KIN) is dedicated to exploring the intersection of knowledge, information, and innovation, particularly within organizational and business contexts.
They've hosted challenges on making learning more exciting, creating an inclusive student association, and encouraging eco-friendly consumer behavior.
For this particular example, we’ll review the Connect Campus Challenge they ran in 2023.
Objectives
After returning from the pandemic, VU saw that it became difficult for campus members to reconnect with one another. So their goal was to encourage building meaningful relationships.
They created the Connect Campus Challenge and invited students, teachers, and staff members to share ideas on fostering connections.
Information Inside the Challenge
The innovation challenge emphasized the importance and benefits of creating a more connected campus to encourage everyone to share ideas.
UV also added a submission form containing the following questions:
How can we help students and staff members fight loneliness?
How can we create a more connected community?
How can we bridge classroom activities to society?
How can we make international students feel more welcome?
What facilities do students and employees need to recharge?
Results
After running this challenge for ten weeks, students, teachers, and staff members shared 55 ideas. These are some of the winners:
Tjeerd Thunissen suggested organizing an art competition with prizes. Students could collaborate to create artwork, and those with the best submissions would win prizes. This idea turned into the VU Stairwell Art Competition, which ultimately helped students reduce stress and connect with each other through artwork.
Laura Ivaci and Bertram Ponoicny recommended launching an annual event where students from different backgrounds can get together and share insights into their cultures using food, music, and humor. This idea turned into an event called Culture and Country Fairs, which encouraged students to learn more about each other's cultures and build deeper relationships.
Hsen Khalil submitted an idea for implementing a recycling program that encourages students to work together toward a greener campus. This idea received the most votes and ultimately became the VU GreenCents: Recycling for Sustainability and Savings program.
4. Mobily Saudi Arabia
Mobily and Saudi Credit and Savings Bank (SCSB) collaborated with our team to launch Firnas, an innovation management platform. The goal was to spark entrepreneurship among young Saudis by providing participants with the skills required to launch innovative technologies that can potentially help solve societal problems.
After launch, Firnas marked a significant milestone as the first digital accelerator in the Arab world and was later nominated for a Forrester Groundswell Award.
Objectives
Mobily called young Saudi entrepreneurs, innovators, and startups to submit ideas on three main areas:
How can the education system of Saudi Arabia be improved?
How can the quality of life be improved for Saudi women?
How can the Hajj be made safer using technology, given that it is the largest gathering of people in the world?
SCSB delivered technical and business management training to all participants, helping them develop innovative ideas that address these three priorities.
Then, Mobily would provide the authors of the winning ideas with operational and marketing support to bring these ideas to life.
The authors of the top three innovation projects would also receive SR10,000, SR5,000, and SR2,500, respectively.
Information Inside the Challenge
Mobily and SCSB used Firnas to keep all participants updated on the latest technology and entrepreneurship news, allowing them to use these resources as inspiration when coming up with ideas.
They also held events that provided participants with training to address the three priorities above. For example, Mobily organized a trip to Shanghai, China, where a group of innovation enthusiasts underwent training on smart wearable devices, healthcare technology, digital transformation, and automation.
This gave participants the necessary context around Mobily and SCSB’s innovation priorities and technical training to develop ideas into shippable products.
Results
These are the finalists for each of the three social innovation challenges.
The winning ideas include:
A health monitoring system for remote areas — a technology-driven solution for providing medical services in underserved regions.
An application designed to enhance the Hajj pilgrimage experience by providing logistical support and information.
A platform aimed at connecting local Saudi artisans with international markets, promoting traditional culture globally.
5. GIJIMA South Africa
GIJIMA is one of the leading ICT companies in South Africa. In partnership with the University of Western Cape and InnovationCast, it launched Codejam, an innovation program that encouraged students to submit ideas on innovative mobile applications.
The Code Jam community rates all ideas, iterates upon them, and showcases the winning team’s ideas at the Code Jam weekend. These ideas are then put through an evaluation process where GIJIMA helps students validate their ideas and develop them for Apple’s mobile products.
Objectives
GIJIMA had three objectives when crowdsourcing ideation:
They wanted to teach young Africans the skills to build and launch mobile applications that solve real-world problems.
They wanted to empower young Africans to become leaders in the technology sector and help them build businesses that can create jobs for the community.
They wanted to create a pool of highly skilled individuals from which the technology industry could draw from in the future.
Information Inside the Challenge
Students would attend workshops hosted by Gijima and their sponsors. Here, they learned the coding and business management skills required to brainstorm innovative mobile app ideas and build MVPs.
Results
GIJIMA ran this innovation competition from March to May 2012. Once the winning ideas were selected, GIJIMA provided the authors with mentors and additional training to validate and launch their ideas. Several apps were developed from the program though we cannot disclose exact details.
Run Effective Innovation Challenges with InnovationCast
In many organizations, the idea management process is siloed inside many different tools. Ideas are collected via surveys, assessed in spreadsheets, and validated and implemented inside project management software.
This can hurt collaboration as there isn’t a centralized platform where the users can contribute to solving strategically-relevant challenges in different ways, beyond just submitting ideas.
Additionally, participants can’t see what happens to their ideas once they’ve submitted them. They don’t know if their idea is being assessed, tested, or actually launched, which can reduce engagement with future challenges.
We created InnovationCast, our innovation management platform, to solve this problem.
Companies using InnovationCast crack complex problems by connecting people with complementary skills, experiences, and mindsets to co-create ideas and brainstorm multiple solutions.
InnovationCast allows innovation managers to run challenges and gather ideas on organizational priorities. They can create detailed challenges by attaching resources like customer data, research papers, news articles, and any other background information required for participants to understand the priority.
Innovation managers can also create submission forms that guide participants with questions about their ideas. This prompts participants to give more details on their idea’s potential impact and feasibility and how it supports the initiative.
Then, innovation managers can use our automated email drip campaigns to easily onboard participants and encourage them to respond with their best ideas. Once they've selected the winning ideas, innovation managers can test and launch them using our idea evaluation workflows.
This way, innovation managers have everything they need to create a culture of innovation. They can collect, assess, test, and launch ideas — all inside a single hub.
If you'd like to learn more about using innovation challenges to collect high-quality ideas on organizational priorities, contact our team for a free demo.
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