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 newinnovation practice and innovation orientation in an engineering consultancy company. The ideacompetition is used internally in the organization to collect employee ideas for internal processimprovements. The case study reveals that the idea competition tool act both as a catalyst tothink differently about innovation and as tool to guide the implementation of the new innovationapproach through well defined roles combining fun and serious business. The idea competitiontool helps to overcome existing organizational barriers by creating a strategic businessarchitecture encouraging employees to contribute with innovative ideas that the company maydevelop and implement for the good of the company. The findings indicate that more anddifferent innovation orientations may co-exist in the same organization, complementing eachother, such as balancing an external customer orientation with an innovation orientation focusingon internal innovations.