For business leaders, much of their role involves spinning multiple plates at a time and responding quickly to new problems and situations as they appear. Juggling responsibilities while keeping the business agile and innovative is a time-consuming and potentially exhaustive task.
Challenge sourcing ensures that your organisation continuously innovates and focuses on solving the problems that matter.
What is challenge sourcing?
Challenge sourcing is identifying problems, opportunities or ideas for improvement within your business and sourcing them across your organisation. By doing so, you can ensure that everyone in your organisation has a voice and an opportunity to contribute to innovation, regardless of their position or department.
It also means that as a leader, you have hundreds, if not thousands, of sets of eyes and ears across the business, each with a unique and informed perspective, helping to reveal the challenges and opportunities in your business.
However, finding the best mechanism to uncover and prioritise these challenges and opportunities takes a lot of work. This guide breaks challenge sourcing and prioritisation into four easily digestible stages, examining how to collect, store and manage innovation challenges, the critical elements of prioritisation and how to establish a cadence to help you kick off those projects and bring them successfully to fruition.
Stage One: Challenge Sourcing
Challenge sourcing allows leaders to engage stakeholders from every corner of the business. It will enable people on the ground to tell you about challenges and opportunities they see in their day-to-day work.
Let stakeholders tell you where they find inefficiencies, where technology could make their work more valuable to the business and how the organisation can create better customer outcomes. This stage is about something other than editing; there should be no challenge too big or too small to bring to the table.
For this first stage, the mission is to gather as much information as possible to understand the scope of the challenge. Including where it sits within the business, an overview of the issue, the essential resources and people involved and an estimate of the impact a resolution could have on the business.
Creating a challenge form is one of the easiest ways to collate this information. Tools including Typeform, SurveyMonkey and Google Forms are all valuable pieces of software that can be utilised for this stage. The form should enable your team to flag challenges specific to their department and responsibilities - adding an option to make these anonymous may empower your team to be more honest in their feedback.
Communicate clearly to your team what the form is for and how it will help the business. The form should be simple and efficient to yield the best results. As this is arguably one of the most crucial stages of the process, make enough time to gather as much information as possible.
The identified challenges should then be fed into a challenge pool or holding pen. This should be a space where all challenges can live and be managed so that none are left behind in the prioritisation process. The holding pen could exist as a Trello board or a spreadsheet, where you can categorise and organise the challenges.
Stage Two: Challenge Prioritisation
For some of the challenges, prioritisation may be easy. There will be some at crisis point and others far less pressing. However, to make more informed choices and decipher which challenges will be the most vital to solve, you will want to build a mechanism for ranking your projects. McKinsey's Three Horizons could provide a helpful framework for your ranking. However, a good challenge priority list should have a healthy mix of all three horizons.
Utilising predetermined criteria outlined in the early steps of your stage gate methodology, you can create a challenge scorecard to help you prioritise. Follow the V-SAFE screening model to keep the process focused and immediately separate the more peripheral challenges.
Value: What substantial results will this innovation challenge have on the business? Does it have the potential to increase revenue? What is the return on investment?
Suitable: Does the challenge fit in with the current strategy of the business?
Acceptable: Will the solution or innovation be accepted internally by stakeholders?
Feasible: Is solving this challenge realistic regarding time, resources and budget?
Enduring: Does the challenge have the potential to add value in both the long and short term?
The V-SAFE method is an example of what to score your innovation challenges on — tailoring your scores to the specifics of your business, industry and customer base will also be helpful. The important thing is to remain objective and realistic within your assessment.
Stage Three: Planning
Design a detailed roadmap for each challenge, which addresses the key stages of the innovation, potential barriers and variables while remaining agile to business evolution and new problems. This should all be kept to a realistic but tightly scheduled timeframe.
If there is any sign in this process that the challenge may not be achievable, then you can 'no-go' and return to the challenge later.
Establish how you plan to track the challenge innovation's progress ahead of time. A straightforward way of doing this is looking for improvements in your finances - a positive impact means a positive change. Other options are creating trackers and forms for customer or employee experience and looking for positive results.
Stage Four: Delivery
There should be a continuous review of whether a project is a go/no-go. If the challenge has survived up to this point, it’s time to begin the first pilot phase. Pilots are there to educate; the learnings gathered from piloting an innovation or solution will inform the final product or offering.
After each pilot phase, there should be a debrief, informed by data you gathered during its timespan. It should then be determined whether the pilot has more potential to improve or is a 'no-go' and returned to the challenge pool. It's essential to assess the current market and whether the pilot can meet the speed of its fast-paced volatility.
If the pilot is given the go-ahead, it’s time to tweak and implement changes within the solution tailored to any feedback gained. Remember your timeline and budget. Processes like these have the potential to repeat over and over again - it's crucial to know when to let go of an idea and when to put energy into it.
If your pilots and iterations have proven successful, lessons have been learned and applied, and you can see tangible results, you can think about how to implement and scale this permanently into your business.
Ultimately, challenge sourcing aims to create a culture of innovation within your business, where everyone is encouraged and empowered to boost the business and its progression. By streamlining and simplifying the process, you can easily embed it into your existing systems and make it a natural part of your day-to-day.
Innovation is critical to any business's survival. By implementing a challenge sourcing methodology, you can keep your business ahead of the markets and become a disruptor and pioneer of your industry.
If you’re looking for space to innovate or want to connect with exciting innovators at the leading edge of their industries, book a tour of a Plus X Innovation hub in London, Slough, or Brighton.
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