COMPETITION DESIGN
The marketing division of a global asset management firm wanted to engage marketing associates directly in solving key pain points felt by the client groups, who are their internal customers.
As part of their strategy for enabling associates to better respond to client group needs, the management team wanted associates to find and use skills that were not part of their typical day-to-day work.
We co-designed an innovation competition for all 70 members of the division, across 3 countries, which ran over a three-month period.
NEW CAPABILITIES DEVELOPMENT
The competition was carefully designed to balance input needs with the high levels of ‘business as usual’ during the same period. Using a user-centric workshop approach allowed us to quickly understand the motivational profiles for the division, that we in turn built into the competition dynamics to ensure lots of lightweight touch-points throughout: workshops on ideation, creative working, self-organising teams. As teams worked through the competition period, we supported the project team through weekly checkpoints and content creation. Our aim was to ensure that the competition could be a repeatable part of the marketing division’s ongoing activity, which could be owned in-house.
INNOVATIVE OUTPUT, REUSABLE DESIGN
The client groups have all been engaged in understanding the huge amount of value generated by the competing teams and the winning team have already seen their idea taken forward and launched as a formal product. Each of the concepts developed are now planned for implementation throughout the 2015 calendar year.
Surfacing marketing innovation
Calling all innovators…
The competition provided intrinsic motivations for marketers across the firm to share their best ideas and gain recognition.
Focussing outside the norm
To find the best ideas, we asked associates to step outside the day-to-day and re-imagine key processes to better serve the client group.
New thinking, new products
The initial wave of internal innovation ideas led to the development of a new product, keeping this firm at the forefront of its industry.
