Harvard Business School Case Study: ICL “BIG” Ideas
Innovation Hackathons: Uncovering Great Solutions at Speed
What is an Innovation Hackathon?
An innovation hackathon is an event where employees, customers, or any audience come together to rapidly identify solutions to any problem. Hackathons can be a highly effective, engaging, and exciting approach to solving innovation challenges in a short period of time.
What are the Benefits of Innovation Hackathons?
Problem Solving
By bringing everyone together to crowdsource solutions, hackathons benefit from a diverse range of perspectives. This can be invaluable in solving problems that individual employees or teams have been battling to overcome for a long time. The addition of extra brains who might approach a problem in different ways can so often unlock the answers!
New Revenue Streams
The ideas and solutions gathered during innovation hackathons can help your organization to identify new ways of generating revenue. These can include ideas for new products and services, along with new use cases for your existing offerings..
Rapid Process
Innovation hackathons allow you to make a huge amount of progress in a short amount of time. The intensity of the format coupled with the number of participants leads to high numbers of ideas or solutions being put forward, sense-checked, and developed by people with a diverse range of skillsets and perspectives.
Unleash Creativity
Innovation hackathons can take people away from their comfort zones. It gives them a new format to think differently and approach problems from another perspective in a competitive environment, which can help them to unlock challenges that they might have been struggling with for some time.
What The Experts Say:
What The Experts Say:
The world is changing so quickly that we need a paradigm shift in how we manage innovation. This shift requires us to transform our organizations and create successful innovation ecosystems.
58% of business leaders stated that they plan to increase their investment in innovation and R&D, because innovation acceleration is one of the most reliable and attractive routes to competitive differentiation and growth.
An organization should have effective idea generation and development processes to create new offerings, both by generating a broad and diverse set of ideas and by converting these ideas into profitable business concepts.
What Are the Challenges of Running Innovation Hackathons?
Overcoming Distance
Engaging all your employees and ensuring their participation can be difficult when they are spread across different offices and time zones.
Too Much Data
Running a successful innovation hackathon might unearth thousands of brilliant solutions, but then they all have to be filtered and evaluated to identify the best ones.
Avoiding Innovation Theatre
It is easy for hackathons to become one-off ’performances’, whereas they should help to develop a sustainable culture of innovation with ongoing results.
Loss of Productivity
When running company-wide events like hackathons, it is important to minimize any loss of productivity as staff are moved away from their day-to-day responsibilities.
What is Innovation Hackathon Software?
An innovation hackathon is a powerful way to generate value-driving solutions to problems and challenges by bringing out the competitive spirit of your internal or external stakeholders. However, the traditional offline format of hackathons has some serious limitations that can easily be overcome. With an idea management platform, you can launch an online hackathon to engage any audience and manage your solutions from end-to-end. You can choose to run an open innovation hackathon, involving your customers or other external participants, or a closed one involving your employees.
By implementing a contest within clearly established parameters and a set period of time, you can use your platform to incentivize hackathon participants to solve problems and co-create submissions for new products, services, and process improvements. These submissions can then be judged and developed by a panel of experts – who will ultimately select which solutions are developed.
Our Solution
The Innovation Ecosystem
Achieve impossible innovation with Qmarkets’ end-to-end innovation ecosystem. Develop a culture of collaboration to ignite your organization’s creativity and fuel its innovation.
Benefits of The Innovation Ecosystem
Nurture a Culture of Innovation
Help to instill in your audience an innovator’s mindset and develop a culture where every contribution is considered
Deliver Exponential ROI
Identify and gather solutions that will deliver amazing results for your business
Unlock Strategic Challenges
Harness the collective wisdom of the crowd to solve your toughest challenges and seize your biggest opportunities
Data-Driven Innovation
Scan millions of data points to research and engage with startups, technologies, experts, patents and more
Don’t Just Take Our Word For It…
Qmarkets allowed us to make incredible progress and gain meaningful input and insights from the public.
Lyle Harris
Senior Director of Customer and Employee Experience
We’re seeing ROI in both savings and earnings, with ideas to improve processes, existing products and services, and even new businesses and markets.
Viki Almog-Ayzenberg
Business Innovation Manager
This platform provides a central backbone to the corporate strategic “FastForward” initiative I co-lead, contributing to the transformation of our company into a customer-centric obsessed, agile and entrepreneurial organization.
Vincent Ducret
Head of FastForward Communities
We are very satisfied with our experience of both the Qmarkets platform and the team behind it. The Qmarkets platform assisted us to streamline our innovation efforts and help materialize the important ones.
Amir Barel
CTO
Enterprise Innovation Management Software
Innovation management takes the form of several methodologies. Take a look at each page below to get an understanding of these core solutions and how they can help your business to be more innovative.
Idea Management
Idea management is the structured process of collecting, screening developing, and implementing ideas that can help your organization to be more innovative and efficient.
Continuous Improvement
Continuous improvement is exactly what it sounds like – the practice of continually improving and incrementally enhancing the performance of a company’s products, processes, or services.
Technology Scouting
Innovation & technology scouting allows companies to bypass these obstacles and deliver new products, services, and solutions that can dramatically enhance their value proposition.
Trend Management
Trend management refers to all the activities involved in scouting for and acting upon trends to fuel an organization’s innovation efforts.
Innovation Portfolio Management
Innovation portfolio management is a term that describes the maintenance and progression of an organization’s various innovation projects.
Innovation Management Resources
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