Skip Header Navigation

Next Great Innovator > Blog

Blog

« Why Social Innovation? | Main | October Update- Too many Challenges or Just Enough? »

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.

Posted by Tim on September 23, 2009 3:08 PM

Post a comment






Submitted comments must relate to the RBC Next Great Innovator Challenge. All comments will be reviewed and only approved comments will be posted. HTML is not allowed. Comments that include personal attacks on RBC or RBC Employees or other participants in this forum, make obviously false or unsubstantiated allegations, or include vulgar or libelous language, will not be approved. Posted comments are the views of the individual author and not of Royal Bank of Canada. By submitting a comment, you agree to be bound by the Terms of the Innovator Blog.