Run successful innovation campaigns with engaged people and great ideas
Engage people with gamification
Solid follow-up process (funnel/workflow)
Smart insights and attractive reports
Key steps to success
Innovation campaign
Run powerful Innovation missions. Engage people internal and external and make use of gamification elements like rewards and undercover mode.
Live collaboration
People add ideas, likes (upvotes), comments, mention other people, tag keywords and share. They are rewarded with Experience Points (XP) and trophies.
Scoring and selecting
People score ideas by liking and commenting. Admins score with score management, interactive graphs, custom fields, or make use of the group decision-making tool.
Leaderboards, rewards and reports
Participants receive scores with every interaction. Admins see leaderboards, generate live reports and intelligent insights to make the best decisions.
See the solution in action
Dashboard with funnels
Leaderboards
Idea Boxes
Selection results
Learn more about Innovation Campaigns
An innovation campaign is an organized, time-limited approach to developing innovation. It is a method of collecting and selecting ideas from a certain group of people— particularly those within the organization or even other relevant parties as seen fit by the company.
These events come with definitive and specific objectives. occur over a predetermined length of time, two of which are to:
- Gather innovative ideas
- Increase awareness of the brand
When done well, innovation campaigns can generate concepts and even processes that spark excitement, curiosity, and interest in both the market and the organization, eventually bringing in improved processes, sales, and more importantly, customer loyalty.
Here are ten reasons why innovation campaigns are essential:
Innovation is an essential component of progress and growth. Fostering it in the company creates a lot of value that plunges the organization into success.
It strengthens the client base and develops brand loyalty.
Those who have done innovation well are in a better position than those who haven’t, given how fiercely competitive every industry is becoming today.
Top innovators follow a disciplined approach to innovation to create a competitive advantage over other businesses operating within their industry.
Developing innovation campaigns methodically enables you to address urgent problems and seize promising opportunities.
In innovation campaigns, all of your efforts to bring about improvements and provide value to the business are combined under a single objective.
Implementing innovation campaigns allows you to evaluate input, engagement, and results consistently and effectively.
Running an innovation campaign is a great way to create, gather, and select ideas that can bring significant improvements to the company.
As innovation campaigns allow you to gather concepts from a variety of sources, you will encounter different perspectives, solutions, and levels of creativity that can potentially solve various problems and create an influence like no other.
Lastly, implementing an innovation campaign means valuing the insights of those whom you choose to participate in the activity. Such intent echoes not only in the minds of employees but also in those who are aware of the brand’s existence.
Running an innovation campaign has many benefits, including:
- Access to new ideas and perspectives. By collaborating with people outside the organization, businesses can get access to new ideas and perspectives that they would not have otherwise had.
- Increased creativity. Open innovation can lead to increased creativity as people from different backgrounds and disciplines come together to solve a problem.
- Improved efficiency. The process of open innovation can help businesses to be more efficient as they are able to tap into a larger pool of resources.
- Increased brand awareness. When you open your organization to the thoughts, ideas, and opinions of others, particularly your customers, your brand will be seen as collaborative, and you will be able to serve their needs better.
- Better employee retention. Providing your employees with a platform to freely share their insights demonstrates your concern and appreciation for their contributions.
- Increased chances of success. Collaborating with others can help to increase the chances of success as businesses are able to draw on a wider range of skills and experiences.
There is a big difference between having a “continuous ideas” program and conducting an “idea campaign.”
A program for continuous ideas is ongoing, and companies are always soliciting ideas from employees, customers, and other stakeholders. In contrast, an idea campaign is typically a one-time event with a specific focus.
The advantage of a continuous ideas program is that it allows companies to collect ideas on an ongoing basis.
This provides a steady stream of new ideas that can be used to improve products, services, and processes. The downside is that it can be challenging to keep track of all the ideas, and some may never be acted upon.
On the other hand, an idea campaign provides a more focused way to collect ideas. This can be helpful when a company wants to solve a specific problem or develop a new product or service.
The disadvantage is that an idea campaign generally only produces a limited number of ideas, and it can be challenging to generate enough momentum to sustain the campaign over the long term.
It is essential to consider which approach is best for your company carefully. For example, if you want to generate a large number of ideas, a continuous ideas program might be the best option.
However, an idea campaign might be more effective if you want to focus on solving a specific problem or developing a new product or service.
There are two types of innovation campaigns:
1. Idea Challenge
An idea challenge is centred on stimulating creativity to collect the best ideas. It is a targeted innovation technique that you can use to identify a problem, a demand, or any other areas for improvement, as well as create unique and innovative solutions.
Idea challenges generally begin as a query directed to a specific audience as required by other predetermined criteria.
Most of the time, these idea challenges come through competitions that are sponsored by either a company, an organization, or a government agency.
Participants then submit their own ideas to determine a significant problem or identify a specific solution that the company can use to further its innovation agenda. Once their concept gets chosen, they win a certain amount for a prize or any other reward as decided by the sponsor.
An idea challenge can either be problem-centric or solution-centric.
Problem-centric
In a problem-centric idea challenge, the goal is to identify problems before developing solutions.
This type of idea challenge entails researching several urgent problems and assessing their importance in the industry.
It aids the organizing team’s study in discovering repeating themes, improving the scope of specific issues, and eventually identifying a particular problem to focus on. A problem-centric idea challenge aims to discover and define prevailing matters to work on.
Solution-centric
In a problem-centric idea challenge, the problem is already known; thus the emphasis is on finding the best solution. It develops concepts and ideas to address the company’s issues and hones them further into something prepared for implementation.
Essentially, this type of idea challenge entails choosing the best solutions with the greatest likelihood of being implemented and delivered according to a set of criteria pre-established by the organization.
Overall, whatever type of idea challenge it may be, the end goal is always to spur creativity by creating the best concepts and perspectives that would inherently lead to identifying unique problems and implementing innovative solutions.
2. Open innovation
Open innovation is a term used to describe the process of collaboration between businesses and people outside the organization to create new products and services.
With a rapidly changing business landscape, businesses need to be open to new ideas from outside their organization in order to thrive and survive.
While traditional innovation methods focused on keeping all ideas and intellectual property within the company, companies should instead focus on creating an ecosystem where they can access the best ideas from anywhere in the world.
This could involve partnering with other companies or institutions, customers, acquiring small start-ups, or even licensing patents from individual inventors.
Open innovation has since become an essential part of many business strategies and has been credited with entering new markets and developing new products.
Some common types of open innovation campaigns include:
Hackathons
A hackathon is an event where people with different skill sets come together to solve a problem or create something new. The word “hack” refers to finding a creative solution to a problem. In hackathons, teams of programmers work together to create new software applications.
These events are important because they provide an opportunity for programmers to collaborate on projects, share ideas, and learn new programming techniques.
They also allow companies to identify talented programmers who can solve problems quickly and efficiently. While hackathons are often associated with the tech industry, they are also becoming popular in other industries such as healthcare and finance.
For example, hackathons have been used in healthcare to develop new apps that help patients manage their healthcare regimens. While in finance, hackathons have been used to create new financial tools and applications.
Regardless of the industry, hackathons are essential to bring programmers together to solve problems and create new applications.
Crowdsourcing
These are campaigns where companies reach out to the public for ideas or solutions to problems.
It is the process of gathering expertise and ideas from people outside the company—or at least the company’s division- that is launching the campaign.
When you want to gather opinions, suggestions, and ideas on a specific subject or difficulty, you can use this technique to receive suggestions or comments on your products, processes, and services from external resources like your consumers.
By its nature, this type of open innovation campaign is available to a huge public, which might draw thousands of participants.
Brainstorming sessions
A brainstorming session is an essential tool for innovation. By bringing together a group of people with diverse perspectives, a brainstorming session can generate new ideas and spark creativity.
Brainstorming sessions can be used to solve problems, develop new products or services, or simply to generate new ideas. Here, you can invite both your employees, customers, stakeholders, and other relevant people as participants.
Together, you can tackle a problem, discuss, and evaluate potential solutions with predetermined criteria.
The key to a successful brainstorming session is to create an environment where participants feel comfortable sharing their ideas, regardless of how “out there” they may seem.
This means encouraging wild ideas and discouraging criticism or judgment. Brainstorming sessions can be highly productive, but only if they are conducted correctly.
Co-creation
Co-creation is a process where customers or users are involved in the development of new products or services.
This could involve something as simple as asking customers for their input on a new product design or allowing them to test a new product or service before it is released.
Co-creation can be a meaningful way of getting feedback from customers. In addition, it ensures that new products or services meet their needs.
As co-creation values the opinions and insights of your target audience, this method can help you build customer loyalty. Moreover, it helps you become more agile and responsive to change, increasing customer engagement and boosting innovation and creativity.
Running an innovation campaign involves four major phases:
1. Preparation
Preparing for your innovation campaign means planning all the details before its formal launch. This includes:
- Identifying your objectives
- Knowing the type of campaign you’d like to work on
- Deciding on the problem, if the campaign is solution-centric
- Choosing your participants, respondents, target audience, and beneficiaries
- Deciding on the event’s details such as venue, timeline, and duration
- Selecting success criteria to evaluate ideas on
- Determining the appropriate KPIs to track, measure, and assess progress
- Assigning tasks and responsibilities to appropriate members
2. Challenge
The challenge phase involves four substages:
- Communication. Inviting the selected participants as well as all the relevant parties to the upcoming innovation campaign is a must.
- Configuring campaign content. Setting up the campaign in its entirety, including the content itself, takes time. To make this step more accessible, you can use an innovation tool like Accept Mission, a platform dedicated to taking your innovation efforts to the next level.
- Launching the campaign. Now that you’ve got it all figured out, it’s time to formally launch the campaign and keep track of its progression based on your campaign goals, relevant timers and performance indicators.
- Coordinating the challenge. Send updates to the campaign’s participants, as well as reminders that can help them accomplish the program.
3. Selection
Now that you have plenty of ideas to work on, you may now narrow down your list and evaluate them based on a variety of factors, including client preferences, budget, resources, timeframe, and so on.
Make up your own set of standards and apply them to evaluate every concept. You can also apply some of the most suggested criteria listed below:
- Feasibility
- Desirability
- Viability
- Scalability
- Cost in time
- Cost in money
- Business value
- Customer satisfaction
- Strategic Fit
- Urgency
- Viability
- And many more
4. Reporting
The reporting of the campaign’s outcomes is the final step in the innovation campaign. There are three different report categories, and there are three different audiences you need to distribute these reports to— stakeholders, participants, and experts.
These reports may vary in content, depending on who you’re sending them to. However, some of the main points that you can cover include:
- The campaign’s final outcome – success, failures, areas to improve on
- Results that are in accordance with the marketing goals of the organization
- The best ideas gathered from the campaign and why
- The total number of individuals and institutions that participated in the campaign
- Interesting trends observed
- New information discovered
- Next steps
Ideas for innovations are everywhere. They can come from within the organization but also outside the organization. To achieve success, it is crucial to capture and further develop these ideas and measure their value to implement them at the right time finally.
As an innovation manager, you want to hear various ideas— not only from your employees but also from your customers, suppliers, and partners. One of the best ways to do this is by running a free-flowing innovation campaign that’s independent of time, place, and device.
With this, you can use a platform called Accept Mission, a next-generation idea & innovation management software for organizations that want to accelerate their innovation success.
Accept Mission allows innovators, product managers, and owners to:
- Set up idea boxes for the collection and management of all ideas in identifying problems and relevant solutions
- Configure selection rounds
- Score ideas based on predetermined criteria organized by the company’s innovation manager and other relevant parties
- Allow expert scoring with defined categories
- Select the best concepts according to the scores and insights gathered from various participants
- Keep track of selected concepts’ progress until implementation
- Define a reusable list of selection criteria
- Obtain insights into trends and gain better analysis of ideas through the platform’s powerful tag system
- Access and configure innovation dashboards with KPIs and graphs
- Secure live data connection with BI software like Power BI
- Use kanban boards, bubble charts, Gantt charts, graphs, and other visuals in reports
- Make the innovation campaign fun, rewarding, and exciting with the platform’s gamification features
Here are some final tips that you can use to launch a successful innovation campaign:
- Plan every detail of the campaign carefully. Innovation campaigns require careful planning and execution. For example, it is important to make sure that the target audience is clearly defined, and that the messaging is consistent with the brand.
- Get a team to help you out. Innovation campaigns are powerful, but these events can only be effective and successful once you’ve set the right goals and assembled a responsible team of people to help you meet the campaign’s goal within a set timeframe.
- Use the results of the campaign to further your innovation efforts. The capacity to attentively monitor innovation projects and their results is a crucial component of innovation campaigns. In other words, you may compare these outcomes to those of other firms and make concrete plans and strategies for future advancements.
- Encourage your employees to participate. By encouraging employees to think outside the box and come up with new ideas, innovation campaigns can help businesses stay ahead of the curve.
- Use the innovation campaign to identify potential personnel. Innovation challenges encourage people to think creatively and come up with innovative solutions to problems. Additionally, these campaigns help identify talented individuals that you can potentially hire, and provide them with the opportunity to showcase their skills.
- Reach out to your customers. Successful innovation campaigns typically involve a high level of customer interaction and feedback, as well as significant efforts in research and development.
With careful planning and execution, an innovation campaign can be a powerful tool in generating new products, processes, and services that can benefit both the organization and its customers.
