The needs
Our client operates in a very dynamic industry, where traditional market innovation, while enabling short term growth goals, is not sufficient anymore to grow competitively in the face of category and consumer shifts. At the same time, mounting Sustainability commitments require new thinking as it became clear to our client that operational tightening alone would not be sufficient to meet increasingly challenging goals. New thinking and an ability to quickly unlock new vectors of sustainable growth became critical.
With brands operating with a lot of autonomy, our client had had multiple attempts to unlock Breakthrough Innovation across its brands and markets but at very high cost and unsuccessfully thus far. Challenges were the absence of a specific lean, agile and fit-for-purpose operational model to effectively capture the best opportunities and lead them with speed and agility to market across mostly disconnected organisations.
How we helped
Skarbek partnered with our client across its core brands innovation groups to co-design and bring to life a novel operational model to lead Breakthrough Innovation across brand companies. This involved creating a lean and agile organisation structure connecting expertise and capabilities, designing new agile ways of working, establishing a rigorous breakthrough-innovation-centric Governance model with clear accountabilities, connecting the internal and external eco-system Capabilities fundamental to its operations, and igniting a renewed collaborative and ambitious innovation Culture enabling its ambitions.
We then supported our client in standing-up the new Breakthrough Innovation operational model and leading the activation of its first projects in partnership with the cross-Brands innovation community. Through this, Skarbek also provided hands on expert support to close our client’s gaps in innovation portfolio leadership and technology entrepreneurship.
The results
The Skarbek-led programme enabled our client to:
- Quickly stand-up a lean and agile operational set-up leading high potential innovation platform projects with full backing of all brands CEOs
- Stand-up and accelerate the progress of game-changing breakthrough innovation platforms projects serving multiple brands across the company faster than ever before
- Identify and lead fast progress on ground-breaking Sustainability innovation with potential to step-change group level sustainability impact and drive game-changing category shifts
- Enabled the creation of new external eco-system connections driving significant impact to the progress and success of its projects
- Ignited the innovation community across brand companies, with new shared collaborative ambitious growth Culture, and the right operational set-up to enable seamless partnership within internal and external eco-systems