How a Corporate Innovation Camp Works

I recently helped facilitate a corporate innovation camp for Amdocs, a $3B software and services company that supplies mobile service providers. It took place over four days: the first two were spent on a bewildering variety of crazy creativity activities. These included blowing huge soap bubbles, a giant pacman, wacky physics experiments, lateral thinking puzzles, improv theatre and music etc. You can get a flavour of what was going on from this video on youtube. There were 75 Amdocs participants, 9 customer delegates and a number of outside helpers and facilitators including me and Dimis Michaelides, a Cypriot magician and creativity expert. This is the second such event that Amdocs has held. Organized by the company's chief scientist, Tal Givoly, its format is loosely based on gatherings such as Kinnernet or FooCamp, with emphasis placed on unleashing energy and creativity from the attendees. Last year's camp generated an idea known as Tera-play, which has become integral to Amdocs' products.

Despite the frivolity there was a hard edge to the event - its purpose was to generate ideas for new business ventures that would generate at least $100m. We used a number of different brainstorming methods to come up with hundreds of ideas. We whittled these down to 85 and then to 15 using criteria described in more detail in this article on Businessweek.

The customers then reviewed the 15 best proposals and using their feedback we selected three for development into business plans. Three teams of 25 people worked for a full day on each of the three ideas and created detailed demos and presentations which were shown to a group of senior executives. This was the climax of the camp. Two ideas were approved and funds released for further prototyping work. One was sent back for further work. The remaining ideas were not lost; they will be examined in more detail.

Overall it was an exciting and enjoyable event. The early wacky activities helped break down barriers and release people's inhibitions. This assisted us to be much more radical in approaching the real business issues.

One of the customers was David Amazallag, Chief Scientist of BT 21CN who said 'I was inspired by the innovation camp. The first two days were highly valuable, full of creative sessions and enabled the participants to be "distilled" from their every-day work and to focus on creating new ideas. This concept was very fruitful and full of business potential.'

The participants certainly went away energised and motivated. Time will tell whether the ideas deliver on their promise.

Paul Sloane is an expert facilitator. He writes and speaks on creativity and innovation and is the author of The Leader's Guide to Lateral Thinking Skills.

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