Innovation Challenge

The problem with most innovation programs

Innovation doesn't come from the top down — it comes from people who already have the disposition to create. The insight behind the Flex Innovation Challenge was to stop outsourcing that energy and instead channel it from the people who already understood the business or had passion for the problems.

We built two parallel programs: one for employees who rarely had a formal path to bring ideas to life, and one for university students who had the technical knowledge but lacked real-world challenges and manufacturing infrastructure to test with.

The key difference from other programs: Flex wasn't just offering a prize. It was offering a structured environment — technical mentorship, manufacturing lab access at the PIC (Product Innovation Center), transportation, meals, hands-on expert support — and a genuine shot at being hired or partnered.

Program architecture: three events of transformation

The program was structured as a three-phase journey, not a single event. Each phase had a different purpose and a different energy.

Bootcamp was an online summit of talks and workshops — covering tech fundamentals, business basics, and practical skills. Teams arrived at the next phase with shared vocabulary and early camaraderie.

Rocket Week was the centerpiece: a 4-day in-person hackathon held inside the PIC. Before teams wrote a single line of code or built a single prototype, Flex sat down with each one to understand the project, map what was needed, and decide if components should be purchased. When specialist developers or engineers were required, Flex brought them in — not just to guide, but to actually build alongside the participants. The lab had industrial additive manufacturing equipment, IoT infrastructure, automation, and certification resources available.

AtmosFeras was the Demo Day: investors, CEOs and technology company partners were invited as judges. They set the scoring criteria, defined the ranking, and the top 15 finalists split R$50,000 in prizes.

From unconscious to conscious innovation

The program design started from a behavioral insight: many people already have traces of innovation mindset but operate in "chicken flight mode" — occasional, reactive, unstructured. The Bootcamp phase was designed to make that implicit capability explicit and disciplined.

Participants who enrolled were showing pre-existing inclination to innovate. The training didn't try to implant a foreign behavior — it gave structure and permission to something already there. The result was people who could bring impact to their day-to-day roles, not just in a challenge context.

We conducted 10+ university talks per year on topics like the Metaverse to create a pipeline of engaged participants before the challenge even opened. The in-person approach made the difference for reaching students across different states.

Designing the evaluation and digital systems

Managing 500+ submissions across two parallel programs required a system, not a spreadsheet. I designed a central website for idea submission that allowed participants to upload their projects, attach files, and track status.

The evaluation layer combined automated scoring on predefined criteria with a manual review from judges using a 1–5 scale. The hybrid approach captured both quantitative signals (completeness, feasibility, technical depth) and qualitative judgment (creativity, business potential). This combination ensured that no strong idea was lost to poor presentation, and no weak idea was inflated by enthusiasm alone.

For the speakers' program, I ran a week-long coaching process: rehearsals, personalized feedback, and presentation templates. We rehearsed three times per speaker to ensure the Bootcamp content was genuinely valuable and not just credential-filling.

Building the university network

Over four years, the program developed active partnerships with 25 universities across different Brazilian states. Participation from non-partner universities grew organically as alumni spoke about the experience.

The university program was particularly powerful because it gave students something most academic programs cannot: a real challenge, real infrastructure, real stakes, and real mentors who were practitioners — not just professors.

Through the Challenge, Flex and FIT hired people who today are leaders at the company, and have formed partnerships with startups that entered the market. The program served as a talent pipeline with an unusual filter: it didn't select by grades or résumés, it selected by how people behaved under creative pressure.

Key takeaways from 7 editions

Cross-functional collaboration is not optional. Innovation doesn't thrive in silos — it needs people from different areas, backgrounds, and institutions working toward a shared problem. The program was designed around that from the start.

Over-communication is necessary. The biggest coordination challenge was maintaining message clarity across 25 universities, dozens of mentors, internal teams, and 500+ participants. Repetition ensures alignment; assuming people understood is how programs fail.

Empowering others adds more value than solving for them. The role was to give participants the tools, infrastructure, and mentorship to succeed — not to do it for them. The best outcomes came from teams that had full autonomy with full support.