Annual Innovation Awards
Annual awards for innovation are the best and worst thing around. Awards ceremonies can be a time consuming show. Awards can be a demotivator for those who do not win. Innovation shouldn’t be a once a year event. Still, I recommend organizing annual Awards, as they are a high impact opportunity to promote innovation in the corporation.
How did we organize them? Once a year, I asked the commercial leaders for their most critical business/customer challenges that required innovative solutions. I secured the final challenge selection and sponsorship from the President. Proposals were solicited through broad global communication. A jury selected the winning innovations, based on specific criteria. The winners were publicly celebrated at a live ceremony, chaired by the President. Global communication followed.
In my experience, the annual innovation awards are one of the most powerful tools to stimulate an innovation mindset across the corporation, because they:
- emphasise the corporation’s commitment to innovation;
- provide an opportunity to engage operational leadership, business teams and multiple divisional leaders (IT, HR, manufacturing,…) by inviting them to be in the selection jury;
- illustrate to the whole organization how “good innovations” look like;
- reaches every employee and every department, sometimes resulting in innovative ideas from unexpected sectors;
- are a rich source of innovative ideas. As Innovation Leader, I regularly provided support and separate recognition to innovations that were not selected by the jury, but which had significant potential value in my opinion;
- offer rich material for long term communication, e.g. company wide announcements, follow up interviews with the awarded innovators, internal TED-like events;
- stimulate collaboration across different departments, like by making collaboration a nomination requirement;
- can increase engagement of employees and regional leadership through prerounds at country and regional level. Those winners then compete for the global innovation award;
- educate the organization about the corporate innovation framework
- connect different “innovation engines” across the organization, e.g. by highlighting Horizon 1-2-3 initiatives.
A few learnings:
- keeping the format as simple as possible avoids that the nomination process becomes an administrative barrier to innovation. A good way to avoid long forms or PowerPoint presentations is e.g. to ask to submit the innovation in a 2 minute video, taken with a smartphone;
- providing only a few, very easy to understand criteria helps the innovators and the jury to focus. Examples of these criteria are innovativeness, potential business value and potential customer impact;
- managing expectations that not everyone can be a winner mitigates disappointments;
- aligning Award planning with other corporate events avoids churn, e.g. timing Award ceremonies with the budget cycle or other award competitions;
- organizing a live “shark tank”-like award ceremony deeply engages the jury, the finalists and the audience;
- creating a “failure” award (or “best learnings” award) demonstrates that failure is acceptable;
- providing a personal monetary award is not an extra stimulus, as real innovators are passionate because they believe in their idea, not because they can earn a bonus. Recognition by or exposure to senior leadership has proven to be a more impactful incentive;
- however, offering a financial award to help the winners to further experiment with their innovation is effective. It is helpful to ask the innovators to include in their submission what key assumptions they would test if they would receive $$$ as part of the award;
- including a follow up plan as part of the award increases the likelihood of execution. This can be a regular update call with the innovation leader or a report on experimentation results at next year’s award ceremony.
As Aileen Lee said about awards:
”Think of it as building the foundation for massively scalable word-of-mouth.”
So, as Innovation Leader, I organized an annual Innovation Award ceremony and gave each Award process an innovative twist, so the event generated each year a different experience and avoided predictability.
More reading (focused on open innovation challenges, but very valuable for internal ones also): The Ultimate Guide to Organizing an Awards Competition
Any thoughts? Please share!