After identified your key innovation challenges reachable, useful, targeted and also unified with your company's ambition and strategic goals - it's time to focus on how to communicate them in a simple and effective way that ensures rich, intelligible, and attractive content :
▪ Make your innovation challenges as specific as you can : Break down the large-scale themes of your challenges into smaller challenges. We have learned that the more concrete and focused the objectives of your challenge are, the more creative the innovators become. Therefore, the ideas you get will be more innovative.
▪ Clearly articulate and justify the need behind the challenge : Explain exactly why all participants can obtain from the challenge.
▪ Contextualize the problem and share the conclusions : Try to learn about everything that has been done previously under the challenge theme, whether by your own company or by your competitors. A such high expertise can bring opportunities, avoids dead end and provides key elements to explain the challenge in the most detectable way possible to the attendees.
▪ Stimulate the conceptualization of the ideas related to the challenge : This idea can be very useful in the process of sharing the learning, the explanation of the context in the Innovation Challenge and in the fact to include new collaborators.
▪ Also make sure to respect the grammar and spelling by sending clear messages :
- The challenges communication must use correct syntactic structures and clear sentences.
The vocabulary must be familiar to the attendees. It might be that the slang language of the company or the technical language is clear to you, but think that it might be not clear to others. Direct questions are a good option when it is used in a positive way. This is also the case for more advanced exploration challenges.
If people do not understand the challenges they face, how can you expect them to participate ? Unclear language will compromise the future participation of your hearing.
Here is a client's vision on this topic :
« It is very important to add your knowledge and share it so that collaborators are involved in the verification of that knowledge. In general, our knowledge includes descriptive information and statistical data provided by the subject area. We want to ensure that our teams understand the challenges, especially when they are more complex. And we also want to avoid the submission of ideas that we have already implemented or discussed.
Imagine the challenge « How to encourage SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) to set up their online shops ? »: In this case, we should present statistical information on our country's SMEs, explaining how many they are, what type and so on.., so that employees understand better the objective. We should also mention the current offers, changes and improvements that have already been planned as well as potentially attractive offers, analyzed but not yet on the market (e.g. trying to move away the obvious ideas) that our company can provide to her customers.»
Finally, try these questions to get started :
▪ Am I clearly communicate how we can all get from this challenge ?
▪ Is it really one or several challenges ? If so, which ones ?
▪ Are we asking the right questions ?
▪ What are the other ways that it has been tried in the past ?
▪ Do we provide enough knowledge to lead the conceptualization ?
Here is the formulation of some challenges that can help you as a starting point for a challenge well adapted to your specificities.
1. What are our ideas for developing the mindset of continuous improvement in all our employees ?
2. What are our ideas to win 30% more customers in the coming year ?
3. What are our ideas to increase our operating margin by 30% in the next 12 months ?
4. What ideas to develop new profitable activities for our group?
5. How can we create economic value while preserving the environment and social connection ?
6. What are your ideas to improve the efficiency of our team/department : ? - to better satisfy our customers (internal and/or external) in quality / time ? - to consume fewer resources (man time, delay, costs,...) while providing the same value to our customers (internal and/or external)?
7. How do we encourage our employees to become even more involved in innovation and how do we ensure that they do ?
8. What are the simple,cheap and easy ideas to implement that can improve my work ?
9. What are your ideas to sort better the waste?
10.What do you have as ideas to reduce the risk of accidents?
11. What do we have as ideas to improve our working conditions while increasing the operating margin ?
12. How do we push our customers to innovate ?
13. How do we push our suppliers to innovate ?
14. How can we increase our motivation, the number of customers and our margin ?
15. How to increase the security mentality ?
16. How can we sharel and capitalize the ideas and actions that have boosted the operational results of our business / our developments ?
17. How can we use all the intelligence of the company every day ?
18. How can we create a break to build together a "concept" that leads men to continuous progress every day ?
19. How can we keep the awakening and momentum gained by the introduction of a new participatory innovation tool and prevent the breath from dropping?
20. What are our ideas to keep and develop our activity in the territory ?
21. How to treat the pleasure of innovating in a realistic (and therefore profitable) management framework ?
22. How do we get more ideas from customers ? They are in a better position to describe their own needs. E.g: a system of improvement ideas categorised by products / services ?
23. How can we double the number of membership ?
24. What can we do to get our customers involved in our development?
25. What are our ideas to fully employ all the employees of the company, in the best state of mind for them, with the objective to offer a better service to the customers ?
26. What are our ideas for doing better, faster, easier ?
27. How to develop innovative products and services for customers ?
28. What are your ideas for future products / services ?
29. What are our ideas to reach 0 waste in our company ?
30. What new managementl skills do we need to manage in order to gain a crucial competitive advantage ?