Spurring Innovation Through Competitions

• Autores: Alan MacCormack, Fiona Murray, Erika Wagner
• Localización: MIT Sloan management review, ISSN 1532-9194, Vol. 55, Nº 1, 2013, págs. 25-32
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Even the most successful companies have trouble developing breakthroughs. R&D programs are effective at accelerating progress in known areas, but they aren't good at spotting new opportunities outside of a company's experience base and tend to be biased in favor of innovations that reinforce existing business models. Increasingly, however, companies are discovering that many of the best ideas lie outside their organizations, with innovators who possess wide-ranging skills and knowledge. To discover and attract these contributors, organizations are launching competitions and offering prizes. As the authors point out, innovation competitions generate numerous ideas at once. And while many of the ideas wont outperform the status quo (or the efforts of a highly focused internal team), it only takes one outlier to open up a new direction. As companies such as Netflix and Progressive Insurance have found, competitions have the ability to leverage the entire ecosystem of potential innovators, with the sponsoring organization paying only for the best (in other words, winning) solution. Competitions generate diversity in three critical inputs to the innovation process: motivations, participants and organizations. This diversity generates a wider variety and greater number of solutions to any given problem. Diverse Motivations In many challenges, competitors in their aggregate (and sometimes individually) spend far more money than the competition prize purse. Although the authors say that competitors systematically overestimate their chances of winning, this doesn't fully explain the over-allocation of effort in relation to expected returns. Indeed, when the authors surveyed the entrants to the 2010 Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize about their motivations, winning the prize ranked only fifth, trailing behind the desire to gain publicity, enhance their reputation and address environmental concerns. Different motivations attract different types of participants, many of whom might not otherwise think of devoting their skills and attention to a challenge. This dynamic is powerful because in many situations it is impossible to predict who will have the best ideas, or what combination of skills will best solve a problem. In fact, research shows that the best solutions often come from outside the field of expertise in which a solution is expected to reside.