Framing a Challenge
Overview
Challenges and the questions asked in them should be framed to stimulate productive idea generation. Innovation challenges at any organizational level should be relatively open-ended and target an explicit objective, such as increasing product sales, increasing company revenue, or reducing costs for a specific business unit or product line.
How it Works
A challenge should:
- Clearly describe the problem you are trying to solve
- With a little background as to why it’s a problem
- Appeal to all stakeholders within your target audience
- Keeping it simple really is the best way
- Have a sense of urgency
- Why is it urgent right now?
- Display clear leadership engagement
- When leadership has a stake in the challenge, the audience knows it's important to the company.
Challenge Question Bank
A common way to state challenges is to start with the phrase, “How might we...?”
This tends to prompt open-ended idea generation. For instance, “How might we…”
- Better understand, involve, and serve our customers?
- Improve our awareness of other parts of the company or industry?
- Gain better insights into use or adoption of our product or service?
- Expand our distribution network profitably?
- Improve our customer responsiveness to requests?
- Become more eco-friendly or be a better corporate citizen?
- Make products that are relevant to emerging or niche markets?
- Close gaps in our market or domain skills?
- Improve the employee morale, efficiency, productivity, or engagement?
- Attract and retain the best talent?
- Leapfrog the competition?
- Increase revenue from new or from existing clients?
- Reduce our time-to-market?
- Demonstrate market leadership?
- Win and retain our largest or marquee accounts profitably?
- Better understand, involve, and serve our customers?
- Make our products more usable/safe/durable, etc.?
- Reduce our administrative/sales/travel/product costs?
- Improve our brand value or awareness?
- Increase our revenue per client/store/geography?
- Cross-sell and up-sell different product sets?
- Increase our client loyalty?
- Build a world-class organization that operates efficiently?