Creating a new innovation practice and a different innovation orientation through implementation of an idea competition tool

We investigate how an idea competition tool act as catalyst to create a new innovation practice and innovation orientation in an engineering consultancy company. The idea competition is used internally in the organization to collect employee ideas for internal process improvements. The case study reveals that the idea competition tool act both as a catalyst to think differently about innovation and as tool to guide the implementation of the new innovation approach through well defined roles combining fun and serious business. The idea competition tool helps to overcome existing organizational barriers by creating a strategic business architecture encouraging employees to contribute with innovative ideas that the company may develop and implement for the good of the company. The findings indicate that more and different innovation orientations may co-exist in the same organization, complementing each other, such as balancing an external customer orientation with an innovation orientation focusing on internal innovations.