Benefits of Innovation Competitions

​Innovation contests, classified as nonmarket competition, are competitions between innovators before a panel of judges. The judges typically include industry experts and investors. The competitors present solutions, usually products, to meet an industrial challenge and organizational or global needs, sometimes accompanied by a business plan, if required. The winners may receive prizes, funding offers from investors, or crowdsourcing opportunities.

Innovation contests may be one-offs or annual events. Organizers can choose a themed event, focusing on a central concept such as climate change or a general event with no limit on the subject.

One of the benefits of an innovation competition is increasing the visibility of a product or service. Innovators often have few opportunities to showcase and market their work to broad and diverse audiences. One can also reach competition stakeholders like start-ups and influencers in one location with similar products, thus easily evaluating their offerings. This gives one the opportunity to find out the areas to improve to beat the competition.

Bringing ideas to fruition and eventually to the market is expensive, especially for individuals and part-time innovators with other jobs. A competition accelerates idea implementation and partnerships. Contests offer free marketing opportunities - in most cases, the only requirement is registration.

Secondly, innovation competitions often allow participants to address a company’s technical needs. Typically, a company has to set up a research and development (R&D) department, which is often expensive. Whether themed or general, innovation contests allow multiple individuals to present innovations and ideas that solve organizational challenges without the exorbitant costs of setting up an R&D department. The investors or leaders can select and finance feasible solutions from shortlisted entries.

Innovation contests help innovators learn about crucial innovation and business ownership matters such as intellectual property rights, product and service scaling, and business management. Innovation contests also help build meaningful partnerships among innovators, mentors, industry experts, and influencers. This team, diverse in background and skills, can continue working outside the competition to build and implement ideas through repeated engagements and collaboration. Mentors and industry experts can continue offering guidance in various areas. The team can also help runners-up with improvement tips. For example, a team may recommend substituting diesel with biofuel to increase the chance of innovation funding from sustainability organizations.

Incentive-motivated innovation competitions assist in presenting complex and advanced products as innovators invest more resources to refine their ideas. Innovators typically invest in and present professionally made prototypes and working models.

To cut costs for innovators, some innovation contests start at the ideation stage and support the project progress until the working model stage. Judgment then focuses on the end-to-end innovation process rather than the finished product.

Innovation competition focuses on innovators offering solutions, mostly in differing industries, demography, and geography. In a regular setting, getting innovators from these diverse channels together to collaborate on a transformative project in a global setting can be challenging and mostly expensive. The collaboration occurs across the board and may also occur amongst the non-winners who recognize opportunities and potential to team up and build holistic solutions by combining innovations.

The innovation contests often feature sponsors who fund the event and offer incentives to the winning innovators. The financial support, however, extends beyond the event. Some companies offer grants and support resources for innovations that may benefit their business, even from the non-winning participants. It can also be a potential recruitment ground for talent beneficial to the companies. To the innovator, the benefit may be in the form of apprenticeship or employment. The innovation competition thus exposes the innovator to potential employers and job opportunities.

Joe Buccino

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