A Proven New Approach to Breakthrough Innovations
Your company relies constantly on innovation. You must innovate to be first to claim a patent, get ahead of your competitors, improve efficiencies, lower costs, or advance your products with new technologies. Innovation is the wave of the future… and you must ride it without fail.
Until now, there have been four basic approaches to innovation: using your internal R&D experts; acquiring/buying the innovation; collaborating Keiretsu-style; and of recent note, crowdsourcing. Now Disrupting Innovation Through Collaborative Competitions introduces you to an entirely new, proven methodology to innovate.
Collaborative competitions organize teams of academic or professional experts who both collaborate and compete to solve an innovation challenge within six months. The approach literally disrupts all the barriers to innovation that companies typically encounter: siloed researchers, ego-driven solutions that don’t work, lack of ideation and cross-fertilization, unawareness of what you don’t know, failure to harness the impact of external innovation partners, arrogance, and never-ending costs. In their place, collaborative competitions tap into the strong forces of co-creation, serious play, and rapidly bridge the exploration-exploitation gap.
We pioneered collaborative competitions two decades ago, achieving extreme breakthroughs in more than 25 challenges for companies including Nestlé, Philips, Porsche, AkzoNobel, Bombardier, Tetra Pak, Straumann Dental, Bang & Olufsen, and more.
Disrupting Innovation Through Collaborative Competitions explains in detail how to organize and conduct your own collaborative competitions. We walk you through the entire approach, step-by-step, from writing the brief, to finding the “best-suited” teams, to running the meetings, setting deadlines, using the appropriate venues, and rewarding two winners: the team that solves the challenge and the team that collaborated the most. If your company is stuck on an innovation challenge and/or needs an extreme breakthrough to gain or maintain a premier position, this book is a must-read.
Sigvald Harryson is the founder and CEO of iKNOW-WHO – co-creating extreme breakthroughs – and of InnoVentum – bringing smart and beautiful design to renewable energy. He also serves as Professor at HULT International Business School teaching disruptive innovation in San Francisco, London and Dubai, after 8 years as Associate Professor of Ecopreneurship at Copenhagen Business School. After his first PhD in the early 1990s, Sigvald worked as Manager at BCG and partner at ADL. In the 1980s, Sigvald worked in R&D with Tetra Pak across 5 countries.
Johan Roos is Chief Academic Officer & Professor of General Management and Strategy at HULT International Business School. Over the last 25 years, his research has focused on leadership processes, especially innovative ways to strategize. He has published many articles and books, and he is the co-inventor of LEGO© Serious Play© and the Mosaic© serious game.
