What’s your Point of View on Challenge Driven Innovation?

By: Adi Codaty

Challenge Driven Innovation (CDI) is an innovation framework developed by InnoCentive that accelerates traditional innovation outcomes by leveraging open innovation and crowd sourcing along with defined methodology, process, and tools to help organizations develop and implement actionable solutions to their key problems, opportunities, and challenges. We asked Adi Codaty, currently Innovation and R&D Head at United Health Group in India about his point of view on CDI.

– Challenge driven innovation is a paradigm shift from the traditional innovation processes that enables organizations create an innovation “marketplace” to execute “focused” innovation – innovation to solve a particular problem, create a new product, etc. Innovation is a risky business with very few ideas turning into success stories for an organization.

– I’m a believer in the CDI framework since it allows an organization to innovate and solve problems while maintaining a relatively higher success rate. Also, most traditional organizations do not have an inherent culture of innovation in their DNA and so, organizations can leverage this framework to create a culture of innovation at all levels of the organization. While it is easier said than done, creating a meaningful challenge is an important part of the process. If the scope of a challenge is too broad or too narrow, the responses might not meet the objectives and might dilute the benefits from the process.

– Finally, most of you are already aware; ideation is just the first step in the innovation process. To encourage responses from the ecosystem, a good rewards and recognition package needs to be publicized. The rewards need to be designed keeping the respondents in mind.

Adi Codaty