RVi’s brand refresh is not just a marketing exercise; it is an opportunity for self-reflection and self-improvement in all that we do as a firm. Our annual Auctus Innovation Competition challenges RVi employees to come up with an innovative idea that can be meaningfully advanced in a year’s time. This year, all entries focused on our Purpose Statement: to inspire people to be outside and engage in the community around them.

In order to compete, RVi formed cross-office collaborative teams and submitted a Manifesto and supplemental research explaining their ideas given the Auctus budget and timeframe. Entries were evaluated by an independent panel of judges. This year’s judges included:

  • Kristen Busby, ULI Arizona Director
  • Peter Eckert, Co-Founder and Chief Experience Officer at Projekt202
  • Melissa Henao-Robledo, Landscape Forms
  • Lee Pilz, Marketing Consultant
  • Bob Richardson, RVi Founder

This Year’s Winner: TripTease

The winning team this year included Chris Lalich, Doug Craig, and Katie Harris. Their idea, called TripTease, creates a framework for RVi employees to experience meaningful educational travel, and to share what they learn for the benefit of the entire firm.

Based on years of scientific research demonstrating the psychological and health benefits of travel, the TripTease program aims specifically at enhancing creativity within the firm. “Everyday habits and routines constrain mental thinking. But spending time in different environments and cultures actually broadens and opens up thinking as unused neural networks within the brain fire and respond – in ways they wouldn’t respond if sitting back in the office or driving the same road home each evening,” (AllPsychologyCareers, 2018).

Using a combination of RVi’s existing Education Policy and a newly-created competitive Grant Program, TripTease will provide financial and time-off assistance for educational travel for RVi employees who submit a proposal and follow certain guidelines. The travel must be educational in nature, and employees must agree to share what they’ve learned with the entire firm.

In order to facilitate sharing travel experiences, the team will create a TripTease Travel Blog for employees to use. The blog will be integrated into our website and available to both internal and external audiences. Blog entries will be tagged with keywords such as pavement design, urban planning, civic spaces, etc. As more entries are added, the TripTease Travel Blog will become an important resource to foster new and creative ideas, cultural diversity, and project design inspiration. As an added bonus, the blog makes a public statement about the firm’s commitment to nurturing creativity and serves as proof of our purpose statement in action.

Stay tuned over the next year as our winning team works to implement their idea!