Every other year, our dedicated in-house Science & Innovation team hosts the Grand Challenge, a company-wide crowdsourcing initiative where employees are encouraged to collaborate to bring forward new ideas that address a business challenge. The purpose of the Grand Challenge is twofold: to engage employees at all levels of the organization, and to generate ideas that can help shape the future of Emergent and extend our impact.
This year, the Grand Challenge sought to answer the following questions:
How might Emergent increase our ability to…
anticipate a public health emergency?
adapt quickly during a public healthy emergency?
deliver solutions in response to a public healthy emergency?
As we have collectively learned over the past two years, investing in preparedness is key to combating future, unanticipated, public health challenges. Together with our R&D efforts, and commitment to continuous improvement of our manufacturing capabilities and quality, we invest in cultivating a culture of innovation that allows us to think holistically about how we can better prepare for public health threats.
Innovation is something that is owned by every single member of the Emergent team. Employees participated in the Grand Challenge in four ways: submitting ideas in Emergent’s open, collaborative, “Idea Hub” platform, commenting on others’ ideas to help them grow and evolve, tagging another coworker that may be able to help grow an idea, or voting for the ideas that they think can have the greatest impact. Intentionally, the program focused on internal collaboration, rather than competition – opening the door for everyone to participate. Rather than selecting winners, we took a pipeline view of all promising ideas, with no limit on the number of ideas that could be investigated post-challenge.
In our 2021 Grand Challenge, 524 employees participated – over 20% of our total workforce – with collaboration across all areas of the business. After a cross-functional evaluation and review process, 12 submitted concepts were ultimately selected to become part of the Grand Challenge pipeline, with many more solutions related to existing work shared with teams to execute on. Each of the concepts allows Emergent to better prepare for, adapt to and deliver in a public health emergency, and are important steps towards our future.
