How Ideathon is Bringing Innovation and Creativity in Life? Discover Significance Goals Types Characteristics Rules Benefits + Much More...!

Abstract:

Successful companies globally attest to the fact that innovation is the cornerstone of organizational growth. Modern-day businesses are usually playing catch up with fast-evolving consumer preferences and technological advances, mandating continual amelioration of processes and products to retain their competitive advantage. 

The Ideathon aims to foster creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving skills among our talented students. It is a platform where individuals or teams can present their groundbreaking ideas in various domains, such as technology, education, sustainability, social impact, Food technology, healthcare, and more.

It is equally true that innovation cannot be undertaken daily or alongside routine undertakings, as it requires unwavering focus and attention to detail. 

Therefore, numerous organizations are setting aside time to utilize innovation platforms such as ideathons to foster a culture of intra-organizational collaboration and ideation. Some others are also employing these ideation platforms for brand building and recruitment. 

The onset of remote work has changed the nature of work, resulting in dwindling employee engagement and motivation levels. For many employees, learning has taken a backseat as they become accustomed to the demands of the new ‘normal.’ The ease of collaborating and ideating with colleagues is no longer viable given the ongoing pandemic, which calls for greater focus on creativity and innovation. Organizations must invest in employee engagement innovations, and ideathons are a sure-shot way to get the ball rolling!

Keywords: 

Ideathon, Brainstorming, Skills, Innovation, learn, collaborate, innovate and change.

Learning Outcomes

After undergoing this article you will be able to understand the following

1. What Is an Ideathon and it's objectives?

2. What's the Importance of an Ideathon?

3. How Ideathon changing the face of business?  

4. What's the Benefits of an Ideathon?

5. How to Choose the Right Innovation Platform to Conduct an Ideathon?

6. What's the Types of Ideathons?

7. What's the features and functionalities of an Ideathon?

8. Tips and Strategies on how to hit the target with your problem statement

9. What's to do to organize your next ideathon?

10 Conclusions

11. FAQs

1. What Is an Ideathon and it's objectives?

Ideathons are intensive brainstorming events where individuals from different backgrounds, skills and interests converge to diagnose predefined problems, identify the best opportunities and ideate the most viable solution. An ideathon may require just ideas, a solution, a roadmap or an actionable plan. Ideathons are typically time-bound, spanning a few hours to a couple of days. Many corporates use ideathons as an innovation platform for internal and external competitions. 

Internal ideathons focus on employee engagement, team building and solving a longstanding business problem. External ideathons are mostly employed during campus recruitment to establish brand connect with fresh graduates. Participants usually work in teams, present multiple ideas and solutions, subsequently working toward the most suitable of the lot. An ideathon provides opportunities to learn, collaborate, innovate and change. The corporate world is striving to shift all its processes online. 

An increasing number of companies are exploring avenues to achieve digital transformation. 

Thus, ideathons and hackathons have been gaining popularity, serving as great innovation ideas platforms.

Objectives 

The objective is to gather

# a collection of innovative ideas from the general public 

# create awareness on the subject

# opening the door for government to provide necessary support

#Developing spirit of opennes i.e. hindrance free.

# build on them to influence policy formulation and 

# promote industrial development. 

2. What's the Importance of an Ideathon?

New ideas are the backbone of innovation and launching new innovative products. Organizations are always in need of new perspectives and ideas to evolve and such forward looking organization prefer persons who have in-depth knowledge about idea of products.

Ideathon becoming a great way for any organization to achieve a breakthrough is by #crowdsourcing ideas and 

# getting new perspectives through different ideation tools and platforms.

Ideathons emphasize the importance of teamwork and a group’s collective ability to always offer better results and solutions. 

Thus, they are a great way to innovate a business problem / product / service by inspiring the participants with the right theme and problem statement.

3. How Ideathon changing the face of business?  

Our world is transforming as we speak. Global food prices are being pushed higher and higher, along with the risk of growing poverty and malnutrition.

Ideathons are an opportunity to quickly ideate, innovate and prototype solutions to industry challenges. Ideathons, and even hackathons, to an extent, are not just for a limited group today. 

Every business is relying on innovation and technology, directly or indirectly. 

In the current customer-driven market, an increasing number of companies want to use innovation to understand the customer psyche better, to track usability, personalize their experiences and build more customer-friendly and dynamic products. 

Ideathons provide your business with an innovation platform by bringing together the best minds.

Ideathons and hackathons are increasingly becoming a norm in the industry as they provide a playground for problem solvers to explore endless possibilities and deep dive for a fixed but continuous period. 

Usually, a minimum viable product, or even a solution roadmap, takes months of planning and execution. 

However, what makes ideathons unique is their ability to enable brainstorming a solution in a much shorter timeframe. 

There is hardly any parallel to such an enabler that nearly produces the same result.

Ideathons don’t just guarantee innovation; they guarantee innovation at speed, precisely what the world of business needs right now. Ideathons offer exceptional agility.

A reliable solution for continuous innovation, ideathons prove to be quite advantageous and effective in a world where innovation and creative thinking are linked to the growth and success of businesses.

Digital Transformation are happening at the intersection of people, technology & process and the Digital Foundry approaches seek to first understand, before applying a solution. Regardless of whether you are looking at a simple enablement or modernization project, a holistic understanding of the constraints, technologies, interactions as well as human expectations are key to success. 

4. What's the Benefits of an Ideathon?

# While hackathons have been popular within tech communities, ideathons look beyond professions and educational qualifications and focus on innovation, creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. 

Ideathons are great tools to find solutions to long-standing business problems. It could be designing a logo, revamping a website, coming up with a brand/product tagline or creating a prototype, etc.

# Ideathons is a great way to make inroads into campuses and build a brand connect with talented young graduates. 

# With the right marketing and problem statement, you can attract participants, assess them on a range of skills and competencies, even shortlist them for jobs or internships. Many organizations invest in ideathon contests to find critical thinkers, innovators and leading analytical business minds, especially in B-schools.

# The ongoing pandemic has altered established norms, most notably the way work is conducted in offices. ‘Work from home’ has assumed center stage and become the new normal. However, the development has its pitfalls too. 

# Employees often feel disconnected from the organization’s vision, working in isolation without being in physical proximity to their colleagues. Ideathons present a great opportunity to give employees a much-needed pause, connect with their colleagues, and devise ingenious ideas and breakthroughs, benefitting both the organization and the employees. 

Ideathons are excellent forums to foster internal collaboration, encourage employees to move away from their usual routine, and ideate in a focused manner.

# Ideathons are no longer an executioner’s nightmare. With the availability of virtual corporate innovation platforms and idea management software packages, ideathons are all about convenient innovation. Campuses or corporates can easily conduct online ideathon contests for engagement.

Innovation can also be affected by heterogeneity. With an online ideathon conducted on robust ideation software, you can solve for diversity and bring together people from different walks of life from the world over. 

You can address a problem affecting larger communities.

People can surprise you with their ideas. Ideathons provide the perfect platform to listen to ideas and act on the best ones. 

Ideathons can also be used to engage customers in return for coupons, cash prizes, etc.

5. How to Choose the Right Innovation Platform to Conduct an Ideathon?

Depending on your ideathon themes, the use case and objectives, the right innovation platform should cater to formats for crowdsourcing ideas, team collaboration & engagement and idea-sharing.

6. What's the Types of Ideathons?

A task-specific ideathon, as the name suggests, revolves around a specific task. A perfect ideathon example for this is the famous Lays campaign, where consumers were invited to participate and come up with a new flavor of chips. An open-ended ideathon is where all new ideas are welcome. For example, an organization opens the forum for ideas on improving customer service.

An end-to-end idea management system can be employed for hosting both kinds of ideathons online. This innovation software needs to support the ideation and the innovation process.

7. What's the features and functionalities of an Ideathon?

Factors Impacting Innovation - The Problem Statement

Ideathons are a reservoir of innovation, and only a good problem statement can produce the desired result. You must identify your target audience, the type of ideathon you want to conduct, and its mode of engagement. 

With innovation as your larger objective, involve your organization’s leadership in the process to lend a visionary perspective to the discussion and think ahead in terms of the business roadmap.

Choosing a problem statement related to a wider audience will ensure enthusiastic solutions, a better participation rate and deeper engagement. The problem statement is important for both the organizers and the participants. A good problem statement embodies the wider objective of the ideathon, inspiring participants to create an innovative solution that solves a real need.

8. Tips and Strategies on how to hit the target with your problem statement:

# Tip 1: Tie the problem statement with the eventual impact to make it actionable.

# Tip 2: If you are looking at benefitting your product/business with this ideathon, ensure to interact with the stakeholders to identify business topics that need innovation.

# Tip 3 : Ensure your problem statement arises participants’ interest and curiosity - onboard your marketing team to give words to your idea that communicates effectively.

# Tip 4: Answer all the questions related to your objective and the problem statement - what, why, its need, its use case, its importance, etc.

# Tip 5 : Build credibility by providing data or resources that support your problem statement. It could be a preliminary reading provided to the participants.

# Tip 6 : The problem statement needs to cover the current state of the situation, the final impact and where the gaps lie. For this, define the ideathon theme – it could be a social problem, a business obstacle, a trending industry topic, etc. It is likely that you have enough research and insights on your industry’s business functions. 

# Tip 7: You must use these market insights when deciding your theme and the problem statement. Afterward, let the participants surprise you with their innovative solutions.

# Tip 8: Every ideathon is distinctive, and your organization can lend its uniqueness to the nature of the problem statement, fuelling innovation.

9. What's to do to organize your next ideathon?

Businesses now are more open towards to idea of ideating and brainstorming to attract innovation. A perfect setup for innovators to showcase their expertise and understanding into building innovative solutions. Ideathon attracts innovation-oriented tech-driven entrepreneurs and students to come forward and work alongside the host team in who can nurture the idea and help it grow.

Organizations can generate ample ideas through ideathons generating innovative thoughts from the attendees which later can also be nurtured and directly merged with the existing product line.

To organize next or future Ideathon, you need the following:

# A duly constituted team of organising the ideathon

# Information Brochure

# Website

# Management support

# Resources and facilities for Ideathon

# Finances

# Experts / Judges

# Accomodation

# Transport

# First aid

# Participant 

10. Set Eligibility criteria

You can develop your eligibility criteria as follows ( Sample)

• The hackathon is open to students, research scholars, academicians, start-ups, freelance innovators, and industry professionals from anywhere in the country.
• There is no registration fee for participation in the competition.
• Hardware projects will be given preference.
• Projects targeting industry problems will be encouraged.

What You Need To Do?

• Simply record a two-minute video discussing your innovative project idea.
• Video should highlight the Problem Statement, Proposed Solution/Methodology, Commercial Potential and Detailed Budget required for building a project prototype.
• Once your video is ready, please submit it through the google form link given below 
• Submission deadline 
• Very Important: Three sample videos have been made available to give applicants a direction on how they should prepare their videos

Summarily the superior strategies can be enumerated and briefly explained as follows:

Have a great idea? 

We have learned from working through exercises with different Ideathons that we hope you will focus your thinking on:

# Identify the problem you’re trying to solve (why is it important and why is it urgent to address now?)

# Get into the minds of the people you want to help (what are their goals and challenges?)

# Create a concept poster to express your idea in a compelling and concise way

# Make room for different perspectives, both from others and in your own exploration

# Describe ways to test your ideas to help identify potential obstacles or key actions

10. Conclusions 

Imagine a world without innovation and entrepreneurship. It's like a car without wheels - it just won't get you anywhere!

Budding entrepreneurs and problem solvers of tomorrow need a risk-free zone where potential ideas and early-stage startups can evaluate their plans and turn them into viable enterprises. 

That's the why part of Ideathon.  

These are some of emerging areas which can be taken up for future Ideathons

11. FAQs

Here are the answers to some of the most frequently asked questions on the subject:

1. How to run an ideathon?

Ans.: To run an ideathon, all you need to do is:

Come up with an engaging problem statement. 

Create an event page.

Invite registrations.

Define stages, rules and the number of ideas each team/individual can submit.

Let participants share their ideas on social media for upvotes and footprint.

Take complete control of the ideathon, sort ideas based on top votes/rating/timestamp and shortlist or reject ideas.

Set parameters, assign judges and announce the results.

2. How will it be beneficial for students?

The students will be benefited by 

₹Building a community of problem solvers
# Identifying unique ideas that can make a difference to the broader community
#Providing a platform to develop an active community that will learn from each other and work toward a common goal to raise public awareness about research and reasons to participate in social trials

 

WRITTEN BY

Prof.(Dr.) D G Mahto 

Director, Professor I Int'l Consultant, Author, Reviewer, Editor I PhD I15+ FDPs-IIT, NIT, IIIT, NITIE I16+Mem.I edX-MIT, BU, Delft, Harvard I Lean6σ, SCM, PIE, AI, IoT I Mentored 9500+I Are you next? "Aspire to Inspire"

Prof.(Dr.) D G Mahto is Director, Professor, Content Creator and Expert Career Advisor at I Career Education for Success|. 

He's helped numerous persons, products and brands find their potential voice through insightful contents, purposeful thought pieces and encouraging contents. 

Figuring out his true fighting  spirit and seamless working for upliftmenting community, inspiring people with his stories, you’ll find him challenging technological transformation, redefining norms for social impact, dancing to his own tunes and rhythms, and crusading through life, simpler way amazingly and smartly. 

He is a person who is dedicated for qualitative change in life through shaping a bridge between Dream and Reality.