An innovation competition is a method or process of the industrial process, product or business development. It is a form of social engineering, which focuses to the creation and elaboration of the best and sustainable ideas, coming from the best innovators.
There are few major works, like Terwiesch and Ulrich, [1] [2] who exclusively focus on innovation competitions. They argue, that while innovation is seen as a largely creative endeavor, it can also be rigorously managed by viewing and structuring the innovation process as a collection of “opportunities”. Profitable innovation comes not from increasing investments in R&D, but from systematically identifying more exceptional opportunities. Terwiesch and Ulrich show how to design and run innovation tournaments: pitting competing opportunities against one another, and then consistently filtering out the weakest ones until only those with the highest profit potential remain.
The aims and the design principles of the innovation competitions are noted in the literature as follows:
In September 2009, Netflix awarded 1 million US dollars to the winner of Netflix prize—the team who by 10% improved the accuracy of predictions about the extent that people enjoy a movie based on their past movie preferences. [9]
On Nov. 16, 2010, General Electric will announce the winners of its multimillion-dollar challenge [10] to find new, breakthrough ideas to create cleaner, more efficient and economically viable grid technologies, and to accelerate the adoption of smart grid technologies.
Since 2010, the IXL Innovation Olympics has provided a platform to source breakthrough ideas, for CEOs from Fortune 100 Companies, using teams from MBA, Engineering, Social sciences and other programs across the globe. As an example, IBM used this platform to source breakthrough ideas for increasing accessibility to screens and devices for the aging population. [11]
A business model describes how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value, in economic, social, cultural or other contexts. The model describes the specific way in which the business conducts itself, spends, and earns money in a way that generates profit. The process of business model construction and modification is also called business model innovation and forms a part of business strategy.
Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services. ISO TC 279 in the standard ISO 56000:2020 defines innovation as "a new or changed entity, realizing or redistributing value". Others have different definitions; a common element in the definitions is a focus on newness, improvement, and spread of ideas or technologies.
New product development (NPD) or product development in business and engineering covers the complete process of launching a new product to the market. Product development also includes the renewal of an existing product and introducing a product into a new market. A central aspect of NPD is product design. New product development is the realization of a market opportunity by making a product available for purchase. The products developed by an commercial organisation provide the means to generate income.
Personalized marketing, also known as one-to-one marketing or individual marketing, is a marketing strategy by which companies leverage data analysis and digital technology to deliver individualized messages and product offerings to current or prospective customers. Advancements in data collection methods, analytics, digital electronics, and digital economics, have enabled marketers to deploy more effective real-time and prolonged customer experience personalization tactics.
Mass customization makes use of flexible computer-aided systems to produce custom products. Such systems combine the low unit costs of mass production processes with the flexibility of individual customization.
A core competency is a concept in management theory introduced by C. K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel. It can be defined as "a harmonized combination of multiple resources and skills that distinguish a firm in the marketplace" and therefore are the foundation of companies' competitiveness.
User innovation refers to innovation by intermediate users or consumer users, rather than by suppliers. This is a concept closely aligned to co-design and co-creation, and has been proven to result in more innovative solutions than traditional consultation methodologies.
Open innovation is a term used to promote an Information Age mindset toward innovation that runs counter to the secrecy and silo mentality of traditional corporate research labs. The benefits and driving forces behind increased openness have been noted and discussed as far back as the 1960s, especially as it pertains to interfirm cooperation in R&D. Use of the term 'open innovation' in reference to the increasing embrace of external cooperation in a complex world has been promoted in particular by Henry Chesbrough, adjunct professor and faculty director of the Center for Open Innovation of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, and Maire Tecnimont Chair of Open Innovation at Luiss.
Empathic design is a user-centered design approach that pays attention to the user's feelings toward a product. The empathic design process is sometimes mistakenly referred to as empathetic design.
Configurators, also known as choice boards, design systems, toolkits, or co-design platforms, are responsible for guiding the user through the configuration process. Different variations are represented, visualized, assessed and priced which starts a learning-by-doing process for the user. While the term “configurator” or “configuration system” is quoted rather often in literature, it is used for the most part in a technical sense, addressing a software tool. The success of such an interaction system is, however, not only defined by its technological capabilities, but also by its integration in the whole sale environment, its ability to allow for learning by doing, to provide experience and process satisfaction, and its integration into the brand concept.
The technology life cycle (TLC) describes the commercial gain of a product through the expense of research and development phase, and the financial return during its "vital life". Some technologies, such as steel, paper or cement manufacturing, have a long lifespan while in other cases, such as electronic or pharmaceutical products, the lifespan may be quite short.
The InnovationXchange, also known as IXC UK, is a Lincoln, UK-based open innovation services and consulting provider, whose purpose is to identify and create collaborative business, research and policy opportunities.
SAP Business ByDesign (ByD) is a cloud enterprise resource planning software that is sold and operated as software as a service by SAP SE. It is designed for small and medium-sized enterprises. The software is designed to provide business processes across application areas from financials to human resources with embedded business analytics, mobility, e-learning, and support.
Corporate venture capital (CVC) is the investment of corporate funds directly in external startup companies. CVC is defined by the Business Dictionary as the "practice where a large firm takes an equity stake in a small but innovative or specialist firm, to which it may also provide management and marketing expertise; the objective is to gain a specific competitive advantage." Examples of CVCs include GV and Intel Capital.
Before being open, innovation happened in closed environments often performed by individuals, scientists or employees. However, the expression closed innovation was coined later and not before the paradigm of open innovation became popular by works of Henry Chesbrough and Don Tapscott et Anthony D. Williams
Knowledge-based configuration, also referred to as product configuration or product customization, is an activity of customising a product to meet the needs of a particular customer. The product in question may consist of mechanical parts, services, and software. Knowledge-based configuration is a major application area for artificial intelligence (AI), and it is based on modelling of the configurations in a manner that allows the utilisation of AI techniques for searching for a valid configuration to meet the needs of a particular customer.
Communities that support innovation have been referred to as communities of innovation (CoI), communities for innovation, innovation communities, open innovation communities, and communities of creation.
Toolkits for user innovation and custom design are coordinated sets of “user-friendly” design tools. They are designed to support users who may wish to develop products or services for their own use. The problem toolkits are developed to solve is that, while user designers may know their own needs better than do producers, their technical design skills may be less than those of producer-employed developers. For example, expert users of tennis rackets – or expert users of custom integrated circuits – generally know more than producers do about the function they want a product to serve. However, they are often not as good as producer engineers at actually designing the product they need.
SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) is a platform as a service developed by SAP SE for creating new applications or extending existing applications in a secure cloud computing environment managed by SAP. The SAP Cloud Platform integrated data and business processes.
A personalization management system (PMS) is an integrated software solution that enables users in an organization to manage and deliver personalized messages, campaigns, and interactive experiences to consumers across different communications channels and devices.