How to Break Down Innovation Silos with Company-Wide Idea Challenges
Discover how to eliminate innovation silos and unlock cross-regional collaboration. Learn the idea challenge framework that turns global complexity into competitive advantage.
Innovation doesn't happen in silos, it thrives on connection. Yet for global organizations with thousands of employees spread across continents, fragmented teams and regional silos remain one of the biggest barriers to collective innovation. A groundbreaking solution in Brazil might never reach a team facing the same challenge in China. An operational insight in Europe could solve a persistent problem in North America, if only the right people knew about it.
This is the reality RHI Magnesita faced as a global leader in the refractory industry, operating across Europe, China, Brazil, and North America with over 12,000 employees. The company needed to transform isolated innovation efforts into a unified, collaborative system that could harness diverse perspectives from every region and function.
The solution for this? Company-wide idea challenges that turn global complexity into competitive advantage.
Large, multinational companies face a unique paradox: they possess incredible diversity in expertise, experience, and local market knowledge, yet struggle to connect the dots between regions and departments. Teams work in parallel, often duplicating efforts or missing opportunities to leverage existing solutions from other parts of the organization. Silos of information prevent valuable knowledge from reaching those who need it most.
Understanding how organizational silos impact innovation within a company reveals a critical truth: innovation capability exists everywhere, but connectivity is what unlocks it. For RHI Magnesita, this challenge was particularly acute. With manufacturing sites, R&D centers, and operations spanning multiple continents, innovation was happening everywhere but not always connecting.
The company needed a systematic approach to break down barriers and create what Innovation Manager Chiara Fabrizzi describes as “an innovation exchange across our different regions.”
The traditional approach (relying on formal hierarchies, scheduled meetings across time zones, and email chains that quickly become overwhelming) simply doesn't scale in a truly global operation. What was needed was a more democratic, accessible, and transparent system that could engage employees at all levels, regardless of location or function.
RHI Magnesita's answer lies in a structured yet inclusive approach: global idea challenges where any employee, anywhere in the world, can raise a challenge or submit solutions. The concept is elegantly simple but powerful in execution.
“Anyone within the organization can raise a challenge”, Chiara explains. Whether they're in Brazil, China, North America, or Europe, employees can surface relevant problems they're facing. RHI Magnesita then launches a campaign across the company to crowdsource solutions from colleagues worldwide”.
This approach fundamentally shifts how innovation works. Instead of innovation being confined to R&D departments or senior leadership, it becomes a company-wide capability. An operational challenge identified by a frontline worker in one region becomes visible to problem-solvers across the entire organization.
The results speak for themselves:
What makes this approach particularly effective is its foundation in real operational needs. Meaning, these aren't theoretical innovation exercises, they're actual challenges that teams are facing in their daily work, making the incentive to participate both immediate and meaningful.
Breaking down silos requires the appropriate foundation. With the help of innosabi, RHI Magnesita implemented a central innovation platform that serves as a single hub for all challenges, ideas, and collaboration across the entire organization.
One critical design principle: the platform must be accessible to all employees, even those without company email addresses.
That’s because many frontline workers in manufacturing environments don't have regular access to corporate email systems, yet they often possess the most practical insights into operational improvements. So by ensuring platform access extends beyond traditional office workers, RHI Magnesita taps into previously unreachable sources of innovation.
In a truly global organization, language should never be a barrier to great ideas. The platform includes built-in translation functionality, enabling employees to submit challenges and ideas in their native language while ensuring visibility across all regions.
In other words, an engineer in Austria can read and respond to a challenge raised by a colleague in Brazil, even if they don't share a common working language.
Perhaps most importantly, the platform creates unprecedented transparency in the innovation process. All ideas are visible company-wide, feedback is documented and trackable, and employees can see the journey from challenge to implementation.
This transparency serves multiple purposes: it builds trust in the process, prevents duplicate efforts, and enables cross-pollination of ideas between different challenges.
“I really believe that especially at the beginning, when you have a lot of ideas, and especially for people that are not really based in Europe, it's really useful to have a platform because it's very transparent and everything is documented there,” Chiara emphasizes. This documentation also ensures continuity: if team members change, the context and rationale behind decisions remain accessible.
The transformation from siloed innovation to collaborative problem-solving creates ripple effects throughout the organization.
Departments and regions that rarely interacted before now engage in active collaboration. A manufacturing challenge in one country attracts solutions from engineers in another. Quality improvements developed in one facility spread rapidly to others facing similar issues. The platform creates bridges where none existed before.
Beyond generating ideas, the initiative creates a culture of continuous feedback and recognition. When employees submit ideas, they receive visible acknowledgment and updates on their contributions. This feedback loop is pivotal because it validates participation and encourages ongoing engagement.
“I think people naturally try out new stuff and they try out the platform, but they stop doing that when they see that there is no follow-up on their ideas,” Chiara notes. RHI Magnesita addresses this by ensuring challenge owners provide timely feedback, keeping contributors engaged and motivated.
Rather than innovation being seen as separate from “real work” or confined to R&D teams, it becomes integrated into everyday operations. When employees encounter challenges, they now have a clear pathway to seek solutions from across the organization. Innovation shifts from being an occasional corporate initiative to a continuous operational capability.
RHI Magnesita's success offers clear lessons for other global organizations looking to break down innovation silos:
Start with real problems. The most effective challenges address actual operational needs, not abstract innovation exercises. When employees see direct relevance to their work, participation becomes natural rather than forced.
Design for true accessibility. If the platform requires corporate email or technical sophistication to use, you're excluding potentially valuable contributors. Consider the diverse ways employees work and ensure the system meets them where they are.
Prioritize transparency over hierarchy. Making ideas and feedback visible to all creates accountability, prevents duplicated efforts, and enables unexpected connections between challenges and solutions.
Build feedback loops, not just idea repositories. The single most important factor in sustained engagement is consistent, meaningful feedback to contributors. Silence kills participation faster than rejection.
Leverage technology to overcome geography and language. Modern platforms can automatically translate content and make global collaboration feel as seamless as working with the person at the next desk.
Recognize contribution visibly. Whether through internal communications, videos, or platform recognition features, making participation visible motivates both current and future contributors.
For global organizations, geographic and functional diversity is both an asset and a challenge. The question is whether that diversity remains trapped in silos or becomes a source of collective innovation capability.
RHI Magnesita demonstrates that with the right approach, organizations can transform their global footprint from a coordination challenge into an innovation engine. When a company with thousands of employees across multiple continents can connect problems and solutions across regions as naturally as within a single office, the barriers that once fragmented innovation become the very diversity that powers it.
Of course, this type of shift requires more than technology; it needs trust, transparency, and giving every employee a genuine voice in shaping solutions to make it work. But for organizations ready to make that investment, the reward is a form of innovation that scales with organizational size rather than being constrained by it.
If you want to transform how your organization innovates globally, discover how innosabi's innovation platform can help you launch company-wide idea challenges, connect teams across regions, and turn your global diversity into your greatest innovation asset. Contact us to learn more.
Warning signs include teams duplicating efforts across regions, employees unaware of existing solutions, innovation confined to R&D only, and low engagement in improvement initiatives. If your global team feels like isolated islands rather than a connected network, silos are limiting growth.
Data silos prevent teams from accessing critical insights needed for breakthrough thinking. When information is locked within departments, employees duplicate efforts and miss opportunities to build on existing solutions across the organization.
Start with real operational problems, make participation accessible to all employees, and provide consistent feedback to contributors. Use visible recognition to celebrate contributions and ensure transparency by documenting all decisions in one central platform.
Innovation management platforms like innosabi provide centralized hubs where employees can raise challenges, submit ideas, and collaborate transparently. Key features include built-in translation, workflow automation, and accessible interfaces for all employees.
These platforms create a single source of truth for all innovation activities, making challenges and ideas visible company-wide. They democratize innovation by giving every employee equal access to raise and solve challenges beyond traditional R&D hierarchies.
