science

Innovation competition

Innovation competition is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Innovation competition rather than just read about it. In short: 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.

Key takeaways

Innovation competition belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Innovation competition to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Innovation competition from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

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.

Innovation competition research There are few major works, like Terwiesch and Ulrich, 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:

Encourage Adidas users to participate in an open innovation process, to inspire their creativity, and to increase the quality of the submissions. Constraints are an invaluable tool for fostering creativity. Generate innovations, process and product ideas for SAP Research and Development through an IT-supported ideas competition among the SAP UCC Community. The concept aims at providing an interface to SAP Human Resources processes in order to identify the most promising students for VCs. Siemens Corporate Technology held an idea competition to help bridge the innovation gap that exists between the different R&D departments and the operational units. The company learnt that idea competitions can be a first step toward more comprehensive innovation processes. Innovation competitions are useful in generating radical ideas for the development of new products for the service industry. Innovation competitions are sometimes organized by a third party (an intermediator), instead of the focal company or innovator community. Unfortunately, innovation intermediator studies happen also to be a scarce resource. Chesbrough calls innovation brokers 'innovation intermediaries'.

Examples 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. On Nov. 16, 2010, General Electric will announce the winners of its multimillion-dollar challenge 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.

See also Product innovation Service innovation Social innovation

References

Sources Järvilehto, M., Linna, T., Similä, J., Kuvaja, P. and Oivo M. (2009) Innovation Competitions, in P. Abrahamsson and N. Oza (Eds.): Building Blocks of Agile Innovation. (in press) Similä, J., Järvilehto, M., Leppälä, K., Haapasalo, H. and Kuvaja, P. (2009) ‘Modeling and Evaluating Open Innovation as communicative Action’, in F. Piller and M. Tseng (Eds.) Making Customer Centricity Work: Advances in Mass Customization and Personalization, World Scientific Press. (in press)

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Innovation competition

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Innovation competition claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Innovation competition before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Innovation competition ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Innovation competition

In research: Innovation competition appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Innovation competition in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Innovation competition is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Competition, Innovation, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Innovation competition outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Innovation competition in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Innovation competition means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Innovation competition out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Innovation competition in simple terms?

Why does Innovation competition matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Innovation competition?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Innovation competition.