The hidden loss in competitions

Innovation has become a buzzword. Organisations are increasingly trying to find good ways to come up with ideas and make themselves innovative. Creativity and idea generation are key factors for innovation and one of the attributes of creativity is generating multiple ideas. What is the best way to get many ideas? A good method which many organisations have come up with is to introduce competitions which give a chance to everyone in the hierarchy and let people feel that they are participating in the whole innovation process. This entire bottom-up approach also seems to be very democratic. Thus, organisations have innovation weeks, creative competitions, creative challenges, etc, through which a lot of ideas are generated; the winner and runners-up are selected and felicitated. 

Competitions seem to be an excellent method but what are the shortcomings? 

Designing a creative challenge is a top-down approach: the management or head of a team gives challenges based on their familiarity and perspective on the issue. It does not consider the fact that identifying the problem or challenge itself is a creative process. In fact, it is often said that identifying the right problem is more than half the problem solved. There could be many ways of overcoming a challenge and many sub-problems which could be considered. Incidentally, design thinking is extremely useful in framing the right problem and identifying the challenges and opportunities.

While creativity is an innate trait in human beings, it does not necessarily mean that all people can be contextually creative. If we examine work in large organisations, the focus on productivity ensures that people become no more than a cog in the wheel with very little idea about the overall system. Without understanding the overall context, it is often difficult to come up with relevant ideas. 

Once the competition is over, all the ideas are collected and then again a committee goes through the ideas and selects what they would consider the best idea from their subjective point of view. It seems to be an easy, engaging, low-cost way of generating ideas for organisations. But is it really? If one considers the time and energy spent by a large number of employees, it is not really low-cost. If one considers the expense of bad ideas and lost opportunities, it is a terrible loss.

There are critical lessons to learn from this: Never compromise on quality in the rush for quantity. 

Identifying right challenges and framing problems itself is a creative process. Creativity starts right at the front end of innovation. Bottom-up approach only works when it is in tandem with a non-hierarchical organisational structure with a free flow of information and in which each individual knows his work within the larger purview of organisational goals and visions.

Ideas evolve and grow. There are no clear winners and losers when it comes to ideas in real-life contexts. They are like seeds with a potential to grow, provided they are properly nurtured.

The writer is a senior faculty at the National Institute of Design. She wonders what it would be like to be on a journey without roads