Competition Fatigues and Rewards

Thought I’d blog here instead of my regular official channel coz it’s not going to look regularly pretty and the thoughts are mostly mine rather than company view.

iChallenge
First, kudos to the 4 winners of iChallenge. You’ll know who you are on Tuesday’s FMCC so have a good sleep. Also great work to all 10 finalists as well. All of you probably worked harder than any of us putting this competition together. To those who won, you deserved every bit of it, just make sure the money goes into real app development and not COV for flats. To those who were in the finals and didn’t win, I know how it feel (I’ve been there once), but there’s no time to waste, as your real challenge lies ahead with the customer.

As the competition draws to a close, I want to reflect on how the entire competition panned out. Although it’s the 3rd time we organize such competitions (2nd one for myself), we always wanted this one to be special and meaningful. The simple touches in adoption of video marketing or using of tablet for judging are all a first and a fitting attempt to go beyond the “mold” that we’re all used to in running a competition.

The motivation of the competition remained largely the same as what we do as a business: connecting customers to meaningful technology and services. We’ve no (at least substantial) R&D to boot, so the least we could do is to attempt to surface what’s good that has the potential to be great, given the right nutrients.

And yet I heard very clear concerns from the industry about iChallenge, which I thought wasn’t really fair, no matter how cheeky the statement has been made.

The first feedback was, we were running this competition for the sake of running a marketing campaign. Make no mistake, it is most certainly a marketing activity (we are ‘parked’ in Business Marketing for a reason). In fact, it’s probably one of those B2B marketing you should pay attention because we’re not even promoting ourselves, but our participants and our judges, who are our customers. This is a campaign for drumming both supply and demand to do more with each other in technology development and adoption.

The second feedback was that the market saw a competition fatigue. Many companies and organization now run competitions for developers (especially mobile), including associations such as Mobile Alliance’s App Venture or platform companies such as AWS’s Startup Challenge. I argue that this increasing trend is a good thing! In fact we have a few more lined up already, while innov8 will also be announcing activities shortly. However, if you treat them as “activities” and participate in many of them, of course there will be fatigue.

I think start-ups or established companies regularly forget that these competitions can actually be part of your regular marketing activities as well! I know of at least 1 start-up who put “take part in significant competition” as an annual KPI. The key here is to choose the right competition for your target market. Not sure about the rest, but at least for iChallenge, it was clear up front that the target audience is our current customers in Singapore and the region, including the judges themselves.

The third feedback was more philosophical, which in its critical form questioned the integrity of the competition as we the organizers “helped” a selection of competitors to improve their entries prior to the judging session. This happened before both round 1 for ideas and round 2 for actual prototype. A remark from a finalist this afternoon still rings in my head, saying that one of the finalist is actually SingTel’s existing partner, implying that he will have a better chance.

While I’m going to attempt to defend this position that we take next, I want to clarify that organizing a biased competition laden with favoritism is definitely not beneficial, even when we’re the one paying the prizes from our own pocket. The point of a “competition” is “compete” for the trophy, and only a level playing field allows for such a competition to take place.

To set the context, let me share 2 things: (A) During the judging sessions, some of the judges asked: Are we here to honor innovation, or are we here to choose those who can meet the market tomorrow? Being polite as we are, we try to position slightly towards innovation, recognizing the spark in people’s ideas. In the end, almost every judge end up favoring execution, especially towards the finals, where a prototype is critical.

And (B) before the final judging, we met with every contestant who is willing to meet us, and had long feedback sessions about not just their proposals, but also the way they did their slides, their presentation skills, highlighting propositions, and for some with little confidence, we even gave pet talk to boost their confidence, and so on. Some of them improved _drastically_, in the period of 1 month, in bringing their ideas and tablet app to life. Not everyone needed this help, but we gave what we thought we could give.

Put these together and you’ll see that this competition is very realistic playing field just like the market out there. There are people you can reach out to for help if you want, but your customers will only take your brilliant idea if you can execute. And the market never waits for you. In the context of the competition, we gave exactly the same time to all participants – 1 month – to come up with the prototype. Is it fair when some already have a ready product while others are only beginning to put their basics together? Well, how about the real market?

Ultimately, this realism in the competition is driven by the fact that we’re not running it for “show” only, but we’re really running it to surface “real” potentials. Our judges didn’t decide to spend two afternoons for no reason – they are CXO level people who needs to run their business, and they see this as an important way to stay engaged with the latest innovations.

I’m not sure if I’ll be involved in more competitions for a while, but I urge everyone who’s looking to take part in more of such competition to figure out clearly the end goal of the competition before taking part. I can tell you I defend Hack Day or code::XtremeApps the same way I defend iChallenge to people who think that it’s a waste of time to hack for 1 day a throwaway product, because the _purpose_ of those competitions are different. If the end result is to encourage teamwork, exercise the brain, and camaraderie in the IT sector, then I highly suggest doing regular hackathons. If the end result is to get investments going, I suggest spending a bit more time on 100 day bootcamps (hint hint). If the end result is to make a sale or start a proof-of-concept with a customer, I suggest you look closer at what we have done at iChallenge first before suggesting how we can further improve the competition.

Here a personal big thank you to the judges, participants that’s everyone who has submitted an entry, or helped promote the competition, or helped in any other way.

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