A few years back, I helped a large, very compartmentalized and extremely silo-ed global organization launch an internal competition. Its goal was to promote greater sharing of ideas, information, best practice and innovative processes. Leadership recognized that business units and functions had effectively been allowed to ignore the rest of the enterprise. Significant opportunities and resources were left underexplored or untouched. They wanted to signal a cultural change but weren't prepared to spend millions — or even hundreds of thousands — to achieve it.
The design was simple, clever and cheap: top management would recognize and reward people who demonstrated an ability to cross-functionally get real value from their colleagues and cohorts. We created two complementary yet competitive awards: "Thief of the Month" — a modest prize and high-profile internal acknowledgement for teams and small groups who "stole" an idea or innovation from another unit and successfully incorporated it into their own business; and "We Wuz Robbed" — a comparably modest prize and recognition for having one's group's best practice or process adopted by another internal group.
Dual prizes created a symmetrical "marketplace" where employees were simultaneously encouraged not just to look for interesting ideas to "steal" but to think about which of their own best practices deserved wider internal promotion. The competition thus incented both "supply" and "demand" of knowledge worth sharing.
