Some companies proudly announce how many dozens, hundreds or even thousands of ideas their employees have generated, but the process often stops at this stage and the proposals generated are not evaluated, refined, further developed or implemented. It is also important that brainstorming is not just a one-off or occasional activity at the company, but part of the employees' daily work.

In this context, researchers on the topic have found that idea competitions simply stifle employee creativity due to exposure to too many ideas and performance pressure. In fact, researchers studying employee creativity have found that exposing people to many ideas from others tends to reduce rather than stimulate creative performance. Exposure to a large number of ideas increases perceived constraints and reduces creative performance (Hofstetter et al., 2021).

Another problem is exposure to poor-quality ideas. The July-August 2021 issue of Harvard Business Review focused on corporate innovation competitions. Business consultants who deal with this topic on a daily basis have found that if the first ideas generated during brainstorming are of poor quality, participants are likely to come up with and propose many more poor-quality ideas. Exposure to poor-quality ideas does not encourage people to think more creatively. Fortunately, there are a few things that can be done to mitigate the negative effects of idea competitions on creativity. For example, fewer ideas should be shown to participants, and pre-selection should be used to ensure that brainstorming participants only see the most creative ideas.

But whatever we do to encourage participation in idea competitions and stimulate creativity, even a successfully run event and hundreds of ideas generated do not automatically mean that the selected ideas will be successful in the market. This requires valuable proposals that resonate with customers and business models that are scalable and profitable. Such development proposals cannot be found in an idea competition. Managers need to provide time and resources to the selected idea generators, who need to form small development teams to test their ideas in a real-world environment. Investment decisions following the idea competition should be based on evidence from the business experiments conducted by the teams. This is the most important step in the innovation process. Finally, we would also like to point out that companies striving for successful innovation need well-trained innovation coaches who can help teams test and further develop their ideas beyond the idea competition.

At the same time, it must be acknowledged that various idea competitions, innovation challenges with prizes, and hackathons can be great innovation tools in the hands of company management, but they must be handled with the appropriate weight. If the results and innovative project initiatives are not taken further and integrated into the core activities of the business, everyone involved will see that these activities are leading nowhere. What is even more serious is that both employees and managers may become disillusioned with innovation in general and say that "innovation is not for us". Based on our study of how businesses operate, we can conclude that a company with a manufacturing plant or a contract manufacturing business cannot just hop over to a new research and development department, set up a development team, or create an innovation lab without any prior experience. Without the right background, it is rare for a traditional organisation to embark on radical innovation activities and quickly turn them into success. Due to the known characteristics of innovation, the risks associated with novelty and the difficulty of predicting market reception, most organisations often need to undergo a major transformation.