Case Study - Packaged Goods Company

THE CLIENT BRIEF

A major manufacturer of packaged goods in Europe were embarking on a journey to raise their innovation game, and they selected The Business Speakeasy as their partners in the journey.

THE CHALLENGE

Raise the bar on innovation by?

• Introducing a new best practice approach to new product innovation
• Generating a pipeline of ideas to meet growth targets over the next 3 years?
• Initiate an attitude and culture shift around innovation by involving a multi-disciplinary team from across as many departments and teams as possible

THE “TRADITIONAL” SOLUTION?

Create a process that involves dozens of people attending a series of days-long workshops where they thrash out large chunks of the challenge at a time.?

• Pros: takes attendees out of the day to day business to focus on this task alone; the fast-paced workshop environment forces rapid decision-making without a lot of time to ponder; a lot of progress is made in what feels like little time.
• Cons: takes attendees out of the day to day business to focus on this task alone; the fast-paced workshop environment forces rapid decision-making without a lot of time to ponder; a lot of progress is made in what feels like little time – but is actually multiple days for a group of key leaders.

THE BUSINESS SPEAKEASY SOLUTION

A Combination approach:

A series of 2 hour workshops by zoom over a 50-day period, attended as appropriate by a Core Team, bringing in a wider team of 40 where their time is most valuably spent.?

Punctuated with a couple of face to face events, designed by The Business Speakeasy but run by the client team themselves, to bring everyone in the company together at key points.?

• Pros:

1. Allows attendees to take time away from the day to day business with the knowledge that they can get back to it later on.
2. Creates a sense of considered momentum that is much kinder to brains and bodies, with all the energy directed towards the task at hand.
3. Reduces time and carbon footprint related to travel.
4. Enables the thinking to happen in short bursts and (critically) in between sessions.
5. Combines this with the energy of face to face meet-ups, without enormous pressure to achieve huge amounts in a short time.

• Cons:

1. Fewer people get to eat ‘free’ pastries at a hotel business centre coffee station.

OUTCOMES

• 20 lead new product ideas were generated, iterated and prototyped during the process.?
• The top 10 entered the implementation phase and the first of these launched in 2023.
• The process generated positive feedback from colleagues across the business about the sense of value they derived from being involved in early-stage innovation thinking.?
• The project instigated the desire from even more colleagues to be involved in the next similar project = a shift towards a positive culture of innovation.

LEARNING

There’s a perceived wisdom that it’s hard to run projects like this over Zoom or Teams, that nothing beats the in-person collaborative productivity you get in a room together.?

Having done both for over 20 years we can categorically say that remote product innovation provides far more tangible benefits and results than 3 days in a beige room ever did.

AND there is a role for face-to-face interaction if it’s relatively easy for you to arrange. But this is most productive when it’s one part of the delivery mechanism, not the only mechanism.

Introverts, diaries, human energy and the planet much prefer a Combination approach.