The Practice of Innovating Through Challenges

Innovation is on the lips of all organizations, and many of them have well-established processes for innovating, investing sufficient resources, and preparing their employees for it. Others are just beginning that long journey of building competencies and capabilities for innovation. Building the dream team and organization for innovation can take a lot of time, money, and effort and does not necessarily guarantee impactful results.

However, there is a very powerful way of learning how to innovate, and that is by innovating; in other words, learning by doing. That has proven to be a very robust way of learning in any discipline or technique, and it shouldn’t be an exception when it comes to innovation, where learning by doing means getting internal teams of associates to work together to generate innovation, while solving major problems posed by the organization's leadership. All this, organized as an innovation challenge.

Innovation challenges are situations or problems that organizations have not been able to solve and that are presented to associates as a creative opportunity and source of innovative ideas. That is, it is a challenge that seeks to find creative and innovative solutions to specific problems. At the end of the day, innovation challenges, once solved, should generate positive change and have a real impact on the organization, or depending on their scope, they could even impact society or humanity.

Today, I would like to discuss two different scopes for these challenges, one from an educational standpoint, that is, as a practice in teaching innovation, and the other from a professional standpoint, as a practice to solve organizational problems and at the same time, as training in  innovation.

From an educational standpoint, today at Tecnológico de Monterrey, where I am an associate professor at the business school, their teaching model involves having "training partners," which are organizations of any kind that collaborate in the teaching-learning process by presenting students with real challenges they have to solve. The problem addressed by the challenge arises from situations and issues that various entities are experiencing, whether organizational issues, market-related, value proposition-related, among others, and therefore the expected solutions should have a positive impact. The solutions presented by students and with the mentoring of their professors, are usually full of creativity and, why not say it, a bit of naivety, but that's where great ideas can come from. The results have proven this to be a successful practice.

On the other hand, from a professional standpoint, doing innovation on the fly is much more powerful because it is not generated through creative ideas from students, but from associates within the organization who experience the problems that need to be solved on a daily basis, and who may have already thought of a solution many times but have not dared to suggest it or have not found the right spaces.

In an internal innovation challenge, the important thing is that it is an exercise in spontaneous participation. Employees cannot be forced to innovate, but they can be motivated to participate voluntarily, knowing that their proposals and work, and the solutions they propose during the challenge, can contribute to solving a problem faced by the organization and thereby generate impact.

Innovation does not have to be a practice in the dark, carried out by a few "enlightened" individuals, but rather, it should be democratized throughout the organization because all employees are the best source of creative ideas, since they live the organization's daily operations, pains, what problems need to be solved, what processes need improvement, where they need to be more efficient, more precise, faster, and so on.

Of course, the organization must have the right framework conditions for those creative ideas from employees to nurture, grow, and develop, and not die in a classic "suggestions mailbox" that becomes an inventory of complaints without echo in the organization.

The first framework condition and perhaps the most important, is to  convince and involve top management because that is where the strategic alignment of the challenge comes from. There are many problems in the organization, but efforts should start with those that are expected to have the greatest impact on solving a relevant problem for the organization (recall my previous article titled Problem-Driven Innovation).

A second basic aspect is the voluntary participation of employees. Participating in an innovation challenge cannot be  mandated by a hierarchy; it must be self-convinced because only those associates who are attracted to solving a problem and know that they have much to contribute with their creativity will be the ideal participants. Those who see it as an obligation will only become an obstacle that will not allow creativity, ingenuity, and inventiveness to flow.

Last but not least, a third condition is to do it with strict methodological accompaniment and, of course, using agile methodologies to accelerate creativity and innovation. Participants must be aware that innovation is an iterative and recursive process. Yes, it must seek total creative freedom, where there is room for all ideas (there are no bad ideas, all have genius in their DNA), where we must imagine new worlds for new ideas to flow, but in the end, yes, it is a process that must be followed systematically to achieve results with greater potential impact.

If the innovation challenge embraces these three framework conditions: involvement of top management, voluntary participation of associates, and strict methodological accompaniment, the results achieved for the organization will be relevant and significant, in addition to generating very powerful innovations.