Don’t Do This Lesson on (Open) Innovation Challenges
There are some tweets flying around on the Management Education for Tomorrow (MET) Fund and their Ideas to Innovation Challenge.
One came from the MET Fund itself and it went like this: “We may not have $200 million in prize money as GE does but we’re still cool. http://bit.ly/dhJ4NS”
This is actually a nice way of framing their competition against grand-scale activities such as the GE Ecomagination Challenge. Unfortunately, the MET Fund Challenge just falls flat when they start off by making such a grave mistake such as the MET Fund does.
Try to click the official link for their challenge. (NOTE: There is a bit more text on the challenge on this link. This was added to the original post upon comments from others.)
It takes you directly to a registration site. There is no starting page explaining about the challenge and more importantly they state no reason why you should get involved and how you and other stakeholders can benefit from this.
A key issue with any kind of crowdsourcing or innovation challenge is to engage your target audience.
MET Fund, I am sorry, but you flunked this one. Big time. The only good thing is that others hopefully can learn from your mistake.
Stefan,
I couldn’t agree with you more. They don’t even share an abstract of the challenge or challenges. What they fail to realize is that there’s always non-confidential information that can be extracted from a challenge and shared with the general public. If that’s not possible, then maybe the challenge is too sensitive to open up in the first place.
It certainly is not good to go directly to the registration page but you can easily go to their site which lays out the story a little more.
I don’t think they have totally flunked it but you might want to offer some advice on this besides this comment on the approach and other aspects of their site. Why not send them a complimentary copy of your book and let them know you would be happy to help?
Management education for tomorrow comes from the support it is given today. I think they would value your help to make this and future challenges structured more effectively.
Incidentially if I go through the other link direct from Idea Connection I don't have the problem you speak off and takes me to the correct page
http://www.gmac.com/gmac/aboutus/met-fund.
Is this not (as we say) "just a storm in a tea cup?"- a little over the top I feel on them "flunking this big time".
Hey, we got different opinions on this one. Beside the comments from Cesar and Paul, I also got a couple of e-mail on this posts.
Paul, you're right that there is a bit more information in another link. I added this to the original post. You're also right that this is a storm in a tea cup in the sense that this is a fairly small project.
When this is said, I still believe MET flunks it big time as they do a very bad job of engaging potential participants. It is a big mistake. The information they provide on their main page does help, but it is insufficient and it is burried on a general MET page. Furthermore, you just don't send people directly to a registration page like that…
Paul, I will let MET know that I am willing to give them my pieces of advice on this if they are interested. Many organizations can use some help and we need to try to help if we can.