A competition of ideas is the most effective way to accelerate the improvement processes of the company and to involve employees from all parts of the company. That’s why every company should take advantage of idea competitions to encourage innovation and creativity from their employees or community members. The purpose of these competitions is to involve all employees in the innovation process in order to gather ideas about improving an existing product, introducing a new product or renewing it. Employees share their best ideas, suggestions and feedback for the prizes or opportunities offered in idea competitions. This allows many different, diverse new ideas to enter the company. So how is the internal idea contest best managed? Let’s look at the answer together. What is an Internal Idea Contest? The in-house idea contest is a tool that allows companies to compete with the best minds in their industry and select the best ideas from the idea stage to implementation. Initiating a battle of ideas, sometimes referred to as competition or crowdsourcing, can be one of the biggest and least costly ways to inject innovation into a company, innovate processes and improve corporate culture. Steps of Organizing an Internal Idea Contest Here are the steps and tips you need to follow to organize a successful idea contest: Choose a Topic for Your Purpose First of all, you should make sure that the focus you create is on a problem that needs to be solved and on your purpose. With this step, you draw ideas around a problem that the company needs, increasing the likelihood that the ideas presented will be viable solutions and concrete ideas. These issues can be for increasing revenue, reducing costs, improving efficiency, or anything else that is missing in business processes. Create a Transparent Process You should clearly plan each stage of the idea contest and share it with the participants. Thus, the participants are informed about the actions involved in the stages and what is expected of them. This allows participants to arrive pre-prepared. Make Participants Diverse Consider including people from different cultures and departments in your business from different demographic backgrounds. Thus, you can benefit from the creativity, knowledge, and problem-solving skills of different people. Encourage Feedback When an idea is introduced, encourage other participants to give immediate, constructive and actionable feedback without delay. Thus, the comments of people with different expertise and experience about that idea help to come up with more innovative solutions by improving the pool of ideas. Be Patient and Keep Contests Even if you have planned your idea contest very well, you may not get the results you expect from the first contest. Instead of giving up in this situation, be patient and plan the next challenge of ideas with what you learned from the process. As we organize idea competitions, employees will become familiar with these innovation studies and will produce much better ideas.
