How to Engage People with Ideation and Challenge-based Learning
Tags: Employee Engagement, Challenge, Planning, Innovation, Ideation

1st Training of the Be-novative Partner Hub

The Be-novative Partner Ecosystem is a Hub of people and resources whose main goal is envisioning, accelerating, and scaling the success rate of both organizational and product-development, creating impactful projects and meaningful solutions locally or globally. We share knowledge, inspire people and actively co-create new methods. We contribute to a better, more creative Earth.

Learning and sharing knowledge in the Be-novative Partner Ecosystem

After the high energy and high attendance kick-off of the Be-novative Partner Hub on the 24th November 2020, we have gathered again online on the 10th of December for our second session. It was great to see new people joining us and see many returning. The event was hosted again by Priszcilla Varnagy, Founder of Be-novative, and Elvira Kalmár, Founder of Go Beyond Project, facilitator of the Learning Community.

How to engage and motivate people to be open in sharing their ideas and solve challenges your organisation is facing? Be it evolving the employee experience, a product or service development, or creating value for your customers, the way you organise yourself around the work matters — this is what we focused our training on.

We believe in challenge-based, experiential learning. So we designed the training to be immersive: we invited our partners for a challenge about a meaningful topic: Co-creating the ideal goals and action plan for 2021. We went through a challenge including ideation, evaluation, adding suggestions, and reviewing results on a collaborative action planning topic on the Be-novative platform: “What would make you feel content and proud to learn or achieve by the end of 2021 as part of the Be-novative Partner Hub?”

With our efficient ideation and decision-making process we could remotely arrive at the conclusions in less than an hour — that would need a day of a F2F workshop with highly skilled facilitators. Besides a great many ideas created, participants’ feedback on each idea created a shortlist of best concepts. These priority concepts can be further elaborated on the platform.

We are keeping the challenge open until our next session, so more ideas can be captured and participants, also people who couldn’t attend this session due to end-of-year engagements, can re-visit our session.

How To Engage With Ideation & Challenge-based Learning

Priszcilla Varnagy shared with us the Be-novative team’s learnings from projects and interviews conducted with challenge participants in the past 5 years. We all could see from the outcomes with more than 150 interviewees and more than 500 online participants that encouragement is more important for people than reward when it comes to a successful ideation or innovation process.

Pris shared tips and tricks on how to set up a challenge and how to communicate about it to make sure we get the right people on the platform. What motivates people to take part in challenges:

The topic itself (not the ideation process)

People want to take part in an ideation session on a topic that is relevant for their expertise and the outcomes are important. It should also be medium-wide (not too generic, neither too specific) and involving so that it contains “We” in both the question and description.

Involvement & communication of C-level management

Encouragement and feedback from valued people (mentors, jury) are one of the most important motivational factors for participants.

Implementation of the idea

If we are talking about reward, the opportunity to implement their idea with provided resources (time and budget) works best for the participants we mostly want to engage with.

Connections with new team members

We are social creatures and we like to be connected with like-minded people. The ability to connect with possible team members who see the same vision and solutions leaves us with a positive feeling and excitement about our jobs.

Training & Learning experience

People like to participate more in those challenges, where as a new experience, they also learn new skills. So we advise taking the teams with the best ideas forward in training where every team showcases their work-in-progress and they get feedback from each other and learn new methods to go forward with concept mapping, prototyping, or validation.

T he usecase of GE Healthcare showed the difference of traditional idea collection (idea box type) and using the Be-novative platform. The first year, when GE used a simple application process for their innovation week, their process resulted in 1 patentable solution, but next year using Be-novative, not just slightly more people were engaged to participate but they surfaced multiple times more ideas and narrowed them down to only the most impactful and feasible ones to develop into tangible prototypes. This process resulted in 23 patentable solutions which is insanely great.

Results & Outcome Driven Projects

We will group similar and complementary ideas together and conclude the best concepts for our 2021 Strategy and Action Plan for our Learning Community. On our next training on the 14th January on ‘RESULTS & OUTCOME DRIVEN PROJECTS’ we will work together on how to ensure the best outcomes for immersive and collaborative ideation sessions and select the highest impact solutions to implement. We will discuss another case study from IQBusiness, South Africa.

In the meantime, if you are interested in trying the platform with your team before you use it in client work, why not invite your colleagues and maybe even your trusted clients, partners and ideate together in the virtual space about your goals and best hopes for 2021 in your business? Get in touch with us, so we can assist you tailor the challenge.

If you are interested in joining our Partner Hub, we are looking forward to getting to know you. Apply to become a Be-novative partner by contacting us.