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We’ve had a few requests and have decided to make sure everyone who wants a shot at submitting a proposal has a chance. We’ll extend team registration to midnight, local time, on Thursday November 5th. The online registration is closed, so to get a late team in you need to email all team details to nextgreatinnovator@rbc.com.

Be sure to include:
Team name
Contact information for each member
Name
Address with postal code
Email address
Phone number
School and area of study

We’ll update the database and send you your team profile ID and password.

Keep in mind we cannot extend the proposal deadline, so make sure you are ready to submit by Dec 6th.

Check in on my next blog on thought starters for this year’s challenge theme!

Team registration has closed for another year. We’re really happy with the registrations this year. We’ve had a strong showing from schools who have participated in the past like Ryerson (the 2008 and 2009 champs!) Schulich, University of Waterloo, UBC and Rotman. We’ve also had great uptake from some new schools this year. We’d like to welcome all the teams from Simon Fraser (who fielded the team that won our first ever Innovation Mini Challenge), Ivey at University of Western Ontario, Carleton, Royal Roads University, McMaster, and OCAD. We’re really looking forward to a diversity of approaches and thinking driving some great Innovations.

So far my favorite team name is a tie between “Black Swan” and “Tesla’s Revenge”. Both are great references to the history and theory of Innovation and worth looking up.

Now it’s onto really digging in on your ideas and innovations and forging them into a winning proposal. I’ll start blogging about approaches and tactics over the next few weeks. We have updated the Innovation Tool Box with some links to sources to get you thinking about the workplace/workforce of the future. We’ve also selected some new SlideShare presentations to give you some angles to think about. Finally, the secure idea share feature is running as part of your team profile. You can enter the kernel of your idea under the Share my Innovation option, and create a list of mentors/advisors to send the idea too. They’ll receive an invitation to log in, rate your idea and leave comments. You may have other ways to collaborate, but if you don’t we’ve added this for you to try.

Thanks for registering, welcome to the Innovator and happy Innovating!

Our Innovation warm up is complete and the winners of the fist ever RBC Innovation Mini Challenge are The Pink Rangers from Simon Fraser University. You can download their proposal here. The Pink Rangers have the unique distinction of being the first ever team to win a Mini Challenge!

We tried the topic of Social Innovation this time around, specifically looking for innovative ways to allow groups that create social innovation and social good to connect and collaborate. This topic was chosen to be more open and less Financial Services or technology centric. We hoped to attract the interest of a more diverse group of students, which it did. We hope to see all the teams that tried the MC register and try for the big prize in the Next Great Innovator Challenge.

The judges found the MC fell into 2 categories right away- good ideas and ideas that really went the extra mile. We liked all of them, and as one judge put it “it was easy to see the social merit of all of them, but we had to judge them in the framework of the innovation question”. We can certainly see going back over the proposals to see what can be done with the ideas, or in some cases the combinations of the ideas. The Pink Rangers proposal worked in the interconnected and collaborative nature of the challenge question and gave it depth by using both real world and off line tactics. The public ranking of the ideas was interesting, with the public being in favour of 5 of the proposals by a wide margin. The Pink Rangers was in the top 5 by public ranking as well.

We’re contacting the team now to congratulate them, arrange their prize deliver and to find out which RBC sponsored charity they would like donation (matching their prize) directed to.

And a special mention to all the teams from Professor Kietzmann's class at SFU (including the Pink Rangers). We recieved 7 proposals from teams in that class- thanks for Innovating with us!

Look out central Canadian schools- west coast Innovators may be challenging you this year!

It’s been a hustle this year running the new Mini Challenge at the same time as preparing the Main Next Great Innovator Challenge. Double the work some days and of course there’s keeping the names straight; but Innovation Mini Challenge (as in smaller version of) and Main Next Great Innovator Challenge (as in the Main event) seemed to keep us straight.

Today we are at an interesting midpoint; the Next Great Innovator Challenge is now up and open for team registration and the Mini Challenge voting is about to close. We’ll have a winner next week for the MC, so if you haven’t read the proposals have a look here before midnight and chime in with your rating. The voting isn’t the only judging criteria, but it is important to share the public opinion with the RBC judging panel.

I’ve noticed some of the MC teams have stuck together and already registered for the Main Innovator Challenge, which I think is great- they’ve had a warm up, now are primed to jump into the bigger challenge!

Some students have been asking where to start. I’d recommend having a look at our Innovation in Action presentation to give you our perspective on how we do what we do at RBC Applied Innovation. I’d then have a look at some of the links to external sites about innovation to get a feel for the approach. Next step would be to get your team together for your first brainstorm session on the topic. I would suggest you get each team member to do some back ground reading on workforce and workplace of the future in general terms, with perhaps some focus on the Financial Services industry but keep it non-specific. Ask them to read what they want (on topic of course), and share a summary or the articles before the brainstorming session. But more importantly at this stage find things that are interesting and inspiring. Then get together and let that inspiration flow.

A few brainstorming tips:- Have some background research done, but don’t constrain the research sources or approach too much. Research from a concept point of view; don’t get to tactical at this point.

- Do a little warm up to get everyone thinking; show off a good example, watch a funny YouTube video connected to the topic ("The Office" anyone?), tell a personal story, have a word association; anything to get the brain out of day-to-day linear thinking mode.
- Have a facilitator who keeps things moving, makes sure all ideas are heard and helps clarify points. The facilitator sacrifices the ability to input, but it’s a very important job.
- Be sure to group the ideas that support each other or relate. Look for novel connections too. Often a group of tactics will illuminate a bigger concept, or a group of issues will link up to expose a real root cause of a problem.
- White boards, flip charts, sticky notes and your digital camera (to capture the notes) are tools of the trade.
- Circulate the summary to everyone and see if there is a round of after-the-fact thoughts. The French call this "l'esprit d'escalier", meaning "that perfect thought you had after the meeting as you walked down the stairs".

And keep an eye on the website and here on the blog. We’ll start introducing resources and perspectives we think might help you form your ideas into the winning proposal!

Our 4th annual Next Great Innovator Challenge is live! The wait is over and this year’s Challenge question is now posted and team registration is open. If you haven’t seen it on the Home page or Challenge page here it is:

"Suggest innovative methods or tactics to transform the workplace to match the needs of an evolving and increasingly diverse workforce."

While it is open ended and forward looking as a good Innovation Challenge should be (no stuffy historical cases here!) we’re hoping that it gets you really engaged. We can’t tell you how to solve the Challenge, but we can tell you that the whole of RBC is excited to see what innovations you propose.

Why this Challenge?

Two factors contributed to choosing the Workforce of the future theme. As we wrapped up our 3rd Challenge last spring we noticed that a number of proposals, ideas and insights coming up repeatedly. On its own this is interesting since that conveys a strong signal about the repeated idea or insight, coming from independent sources, year over year. (I’ll write about that later.) We realized that each of the prior Challenge questions led to mainly client centric and technology based innovations; also a good thing. But we wondered how we could explore other areas that could use innovative approaches. Enter the second factor; each year when formulating the Challenge question the Workforce and Workplace of the future was suggested as a theme. It was always a very close second in the running. The light bulb went off and voila, this is the year to ask you to innovate with us around the Workforce theme.

I’ll blog more about ways to approach the topic, and different ways to think about Workforce and Workplace.

A few NEW things to note about this year’s Challenge:

- The Innovation Mini Challenge! It’s our “innovation warm up”, and is still open until Sept 27th. Take on collaboration and connection to create more Social Innovation and your team can win $1000 while warming up for the Main Challenge.
- Custom alerts. We email, blog, twitter and RSS; you can choose how you get your Innovator updates.
- Twitter. Well it’s not 100% new, but we were the first to twitter for a bank in Canada, and we’re keeping it up.

That’s not all- we’ll be adding features and material all through the fall to not only to help you with your entry, but to give you Innovation resources that you can keep on applying in school or in your careers.

Finally, don't forget you can post comments here on the Innovator blog, and you can send any questions to nextgreatinnovator@rbc.com.