Disrupting Innovation Through Collaborative Competitions: Extreme Breakthroughs Solving Any Challenge Faster Better Smarter

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.