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The Fourth Next Great Innovator Challenge has been revealed!
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.
Why Social Innovation?
First, let me welcome you all back to school! Best of luck for success in all your studies, whether academic or more “social”!
We’ve started to get the word out on the new Innovation Mini Challenge (the "MC") and are already seeing teams register. I can imagine folks reading the Social Innovation theme and asking “Hmm, interesting but why would an Innovation group in a Canadian bank care?” Let me back it up a bit and tell you the Mini Challenge story.
The idea behind the Mini Challenge is simple; we wanted to give students a way to warm up and try innovating with us leading to our main Next Great Innovator Challenge later in the fall. We took what we have learned in the past few years of running the main Challenge and boiled it down; simple entry, online, quick, a more open topic that can get the audience involved; and voila the Innovation Mini Challenge was born. The last item was particularly important as we wanted to attract students that might not jump right into the main Challenge but should! We wanted to use the Mini Challenge to attract other disciplines and perspectives, and encourage them to stay with us for the main Challenge. We also liked the idea of asking an innovation question in the MC which is not so financial services specific, so we can share the innovations broadly.
Then the search for a topic began. This past year I’ve come across Social Innovation from a number of angles; seeing the topic emerge in my innovation feeds, seeing social change happening though online tools like twitter (i.e. hohoTO), offline via groups like The Torch Partnership and their great “Unfinished Lecture Series”, and the Center for Social Innovation just up the street here in Toronto. At the same time we have been able to work with our partners in the RBC Foundation on a number of opportunities. These influences and my own interests came together and got me thinking about all the great groups out there working to create a better society, and some of the emerging challenges and opportunities for them. We’re all challenged to do more with less these days BUT luckily we have things like social media, virtual worlds and mobility as new tools. And some of my favorite “old” tools too; ingenuity, inspiration and collaboration. With that in mind it was a short hop to come up with the MC Challenge question; to ask you to come up with innovative ways for all those groups to connect and collaborate. It strikes me that in that collaboration there is tremendous opportunity for us all to create some real Social Innovation!
So get your team together and you tell us: "Suggest innovative ways to allow these organizations to connect and collaborate."
Here are some groups to look at initially for inspiration in your innovation:
Torch Partnership
(and http://www.torchiswicked.com/ )
Mashable’s Social Good Conference
RBC Foundation
(and support for groups)
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The Innovator Blog is your inside source for advice and guidance on the RBC Next Great Innovator Challenge™.
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