Real projects, real impact
Real projects, real impact
PwC wanted to meaningfully engage its 90 summer interns in an innovation challenge. The goal was to build creative problem-solving capability, deepen interns’ understanding of PwC and its strategic priorities, and create opportunities for impactful collaboration, team-building, and networking across the internship cohort.
We co-designed a bespoke innovation challenge with PwC that empowered employees to develop bold and practical ideas across six areas that were strategically important for the company. The platform then seamlessly guided the employees through five structured stages over a 2 week window: Research & Problem, Solution, Give Feedback, Iterate & Prototype. The innovation challenge culminated in semi-final pitches and a final pitch event, with prizes for the winning teams.
The innovation challenge strengthened interns’ creative problem-solving, collaboration, and understanding of PwC’s strategic priorities. It generated practical ideas across six key areas while fostering team-building, networking, and engagement throughout the internship cohort. The semi-final and final pitch events showcased the interns’ work, celebrating their talent and creativity.
“The PwC Innovation Challenge was a wonderful opportunity for our Interns to engage in critical thinking and complex problem-solving on important challenges in our business. Participants nurtured their empathy, creativity, communication and collaboration.”
Sarah Madigan,
Graduate Recruitment Manager, PwC
“Overall the platform was an excellent tool to keep us engaged and on track. It was cool seeing how our idea evolved following the various pieces of feedback, from AI to peer to expert feedback. The experience helped me make new friends across the cohort and gave us the opportunity to present our new company idea and skills acquired to senior leadership.”
Anonymous intern survey response
In mid-2025 the leadership team at Safefood identified 4 distinct focus areas for their organisation-wide innovation competition. They were (1) developing a more effective and efficient research evaluation, (2) creating a more timely, context-laden research impact measurement (3) improving their procurement process and (4) enhancing the user experience of change management processes.
Teams collaborated to gather and share research insights, used those insights to narrow down on a problem or point-of-view statement, created multiple solutions that address their problem and ultimately built user storyboards and UI prototypes that enabled them to test their ideas.
Teams were encouraged (constrained!) to leverage existing systems and tech rather than adopt new tools. For example a number of teams proposed solutions that used SharePoint which dramatically reduced the time and cost of implementation. Ultimately it was agreed that four (4) of the ideas would move to execution – with a forecasted ROI way above expectations.
