Innovation Case Study

Foster Innovation through Bureaucracy

Challenge

Our client, a large public company needed to spark innovation despite having a lot of bureaucracy.

Project Scope

We have aligned the company to the same organizational goals so that everyone started to march to the same tune. We then inspired different teams to run series of experiments to “move the dial” in their respective work areas.

Approach

Our goal was to spark small steps to innovation and experimentation. We wanted employees at every level to feel safe and empowered to step out of their comfort zone and experiment. Try something new that would make an improvement in their daily work. Rather than having management tell the teams what they need to work on and which areas of business they have to improve, we showed the leaders how to bring the work down to where the work happens.

Results

We saw a massive shift in the energy and the types of conversations employees were having. We started to see teams questions why they do things the way they do and challenge the status quo. Employees started to experiment and implement visual boards to track the progress against common goals. This united the teams to both work towards accomplishing their weekly goals and to share the learnings with their teams. “We’ve had more interactions about money and time saved with this visual board than we EVER did with email”. In less than six months there were 74 new experiments initiated, 14 of which were completed and led to initiatives that made $2,242,180 of total impact on the bottom line.