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The inaugural Innovation Mini Challenge Champs

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!

Posted by Tim on October 13, 2009 1:47 PM

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