Beyond Faster Horses: Using an Innovation Tournament to Crowdsource Your Next Big Idea
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said 'faster horses.'
Henry Ford
Big Ideas are often Elusive
Your transformation journey is underway, and the quest for those initial, pivotal ideas to shape your vision has begun. What do you do next? One approach might be to embark on a listening tour, a strategic move that allows you to engage with key stakeholders and leaders. This step is crucial in ensuring that a diverse array of perspectives is considered. Alternatively, delving into the heart of your organization by engaging with those who directly interact with your customers can offer invaluable insights. These interactions are enlightening, providing a deeper understanding of the how your organization functions and the challenges it faces.
After conducting these efforts, you're confronted with two glaring realities: not only have you yet to identify the 'big idea' that will spearhead your initiatives, but there's also a growing sense of uncertainty within the organization about the direction and purpose of your endeavors.
It’s time for a new approach.
Innovation Tournaments
Popularized by Wharton professors Terwiesch and Ulrich, innovation tournaments create a competitive yet cooperative environment, drawing on the diverse talents and creativity of participants. The key to their success lies in the unique format, which not only encourages out-of-the-box thinking but also rigorously evaluates these ideas based on predefined criteria. This method helps identify the best opportunities while fostering a culture of continuous innovation, thereby reshaping how organizations confront challenges and nurture progressive ideas.
Lets walk step-by-step through a real example.
How It Works
To demonstrate how this could work in your organization, I’ll describe how an innovation tournament was used when my team launched the Penn Medicine Nudge Unit in 2016, the world’s first behavioral design team embedded within the operations of a health system.
Set Your Vision – Begin Broad
Before starting your innovation tournament, you need to set the vision. Here are the steps we took to convey the vision of our Nudge Unit.
Develop a Mission Statement: This is the foundational step where you articulate the purpose of your group. It sets the tone and direction for all subsequent activities. The Nudge Unit’s Mission Statement was a one-page document that began as follows: “We leverage insights from behavioral science to design, implement, evaluate, and disseminate scalable nudges to steer decision-making toward high-value care and improved patient outcomes.”
Form an Advisory Board: We assembled a diverse group of experts comprising leaders in clinical care, innovation, and technology. This board provided strategic guidance and helped address barriers. Since all potential ideas would be evaluated by this group, it also served as an efficient method to gain leadership alignment.
Call for Ideas – Open the Doors Wide
Now you are ready to announce your innovation tournament. Consider taking these steps:
Select Your Audience: Determine who you want to involve in the idea generation process. We cast a wide net, hoping to engage a broad audience and receive diverse ideas. Anyone from the health system could submit an idea including faculty, staff, and students.
Describe Who You Are: This is your chance to communicate who you are before others make assumptions about your role in the organization. We defined the terms ‘nudge’ and ‘nudge unit,’ referenced similar work from other industries, and provided examples from health care.
Communicate the Ask and Set the Ground Rules: Clearly articulate what you are looking for. We provided 3 weeks to submit ideas focused on increasing high-value care, reducing low-value care, or improving care coordination. We were interested in understanding both the key challenge and potential solutions.
Encourage Participation: Think about ways to increase participation. We emailed the Call for Ideas to everyone but then also reached out to the leader of each Department and asked if they would personally forward the email to their members and encourage submissions. We also provided prizes. A drawing was held for a tablet given to one person who submitted an idea. Finalists would receive either a gift card or a fitness tracker. Winners would receive help with implementing their idea.
Collect Ideas: The initial submission process was short and simple to encourage participation. Members could vote on ideas, but only if they first submitted an idea of their own, a method that encourages participation and helps identify good ideas.
Filter – Find the Right Fit
Rate the Submissions: In 3 weeks, we received 225 ideas! We reviewed each submission, identified alignment with our goals and assigned a rating.
Make the First Cut: 30 ideas moved to the next round. Submissions were put into a standard format to clearly state the challenge, potential solution, and overall impact. Additional information was requested from teams if needed.
Vote: Advisory board members reviewed and voted on the 30 ideas, ultimately selecting 9 finalists.
Refine – Shaping Ideas into Solutions
Provide Structured Feedback: Each of the 9 remaining finalists received feedback and were asked to create a presentation. The Nudge Unit team provided a slide template, reviewed initial drafts and provided additional feedback to refine the ideas.
Pitch Day – Select the Winners
The Presentation: A widely publicized pitch day event was held in an open space within the health system and anyone could attend. Advisory board members served as judges in a shark tank style format where each team had 5-7 minutes to present and 3 minutes for questions.
Implementation – Bring the Ideas to Life
Three winners were selected. Each project was implemented within 6 months and resulted in meaningful improvements (see below). Over the next 5 years, the Penn Medicine Nudge Unit repeated the Innovation Tournament annually and implemented over 100 projects across nearly every clinical specialty.
Summary
As Henry Ford noted, customer feedback alone would have led one towards looking for ‘faster horses’ rather than the transformation journey his team took to invent the ‘Model T’ - the world’s first mass-affordable automobile. Innovation Tournaments break away from the usual confines of traditional idea generation, paving the way for forward-thinking solutions that can truly align with an organization’s transformational goals.
Here are the winners of the Penn Medicine Nudge Unit’s first Innovation Tournament:
Cardiac Rehab Referral after Heart Attack
Challenge
- Cardiac rehab reduces mortality and readmissions among these patients, but the referral process was tedious, relying on clinicians to manually identify patients and fill out lengthy forms. Patients were on their own to identify a rehab center that was covered by their insurance.
Solution
- The process was changed from a manual, opt-in process to an automated, opt-out process thereby reducing the burden on clinicians and patients
Results
- Cardiac rehab referral rates increased from 15% to 85%. To learn more read the full study here.
Opioid Prescribing for Acute Conditions in the Emergency Department
Challenge
- Patients presenting to the emergency room with acute pain often left with opioid prescriptions with higher quantities of pills than recommended by guidelines
Solution
- The default number of opioid pills in the electronic health record was changed from initial setting of 30 pills to 10 pills
Results
- The number of prescriptions at the lower quantity of 10 pills doubled from 20% to 43%. To learn more read the full study here.
Unnecessary Imaging for Cancer Patients Receiving Palliative Radiation Therapy
Challenge
- Many patients received daily imaging to align them for palliative radiation therapy when national guidelines indicated most of this was unnecessary.
Solution
- The default in the electronic health record was changed to no imaging, which still allowed clinicians to order imaging when needed
Results
- Daily imaging fell from 68% to 32% and saved nearly 3000 unnecessary imaging tests per year. To learn more read the full study here.
New to my Substack? Check out my previous post:
What Charles Darwin Can Teach Us About Digital Transformation in Health Care