This year's theme of CBS Case Competition is about taking new ideas into new dimensions. To be able to capitalize on these good ideas is what makes you successful. To be more specific, one can split up the two words to understand clearly what it takes to enable you to do so. Novelty is about being intriguingly different. Being novel does not just mean coming up with new ideas. One way of illustrating it is the requirements a new product must fulfill in order to get patented. Such a product cannot just improve something marginally - it needs to be combined with well-known things in a new and yet unforeseen manner, otherwise it will be difficult to patent.
Still, novelty will get you nowhere. Leveraging is key. It is about being able to use your abilities in one sphere (the ability to be intriguingly different - novel) and use them in another sphere, preferably with some form of magnitude factor, for instance the business sphere. In other words, one way of understanding Leveraging Novelty is the ability to apply ingenuity to succeeding in business.
Leveraging Novelty is complex and may be difficult to understand, but it takes you light years ahead of competition if you can do it right.
The Lego Case
In 2007 the contestants
were given a case concerning the Danish flagship within the toy industry
- Lego. During almost a decade, the company had been loss making
and even though things were slowly progressing Lego's profitability
still needed improvements. The competing teams were asked to come up
with suggestions for "the silver bullet", the concept that would
give Lego a competitive advantage in the at the time decreasing, consolidating
and highly competitive industry of traditional toys.
Tsinghua University (China) won the case competition 2007
