Intrapreneurship: Engaging employees in the corporate innovation process
How the implementation of the Innovation Culture engaged employees and made the innovation process more fluid
The accelerated appearance of startups and fintechs around the world has been shaking up the financial market like never before. New disruptive technology has altered paradigms and work relationships in several sectors, challenging large companies to stay constantly updated.
After working together with the client on several innovation challenges over two years of successes and accomplishments, MJV was chosen to implement the Innovation Culture within the company, with the challenge of bringing collaborators closer to the process of innovation and develop new business models.
Innovation Journey: engaging the collaborator
After a preliminary study, the first challenge was to demonstrate the value of the initiative to collaborators. Focused on their own activities, they were not used to investing in the optimization of processes by means of innovation for two reasons: either they did not feel a part of the process or, when they tried to insert themselves, they would come up against bureaucracy.
The main challenge of the project was to insert the mindset of innovation into the collaborators, adding value and enabling the fluidity of the process. To understand how competitors were reacting to the same challenge and which initiatives were being taken, a benchmarking was performed.
From this study came the idea for an innovation journey, a long process divided into stages, which included specific events and tools.
Workshops, hackathons and risk boxes: training teams for the innovation mindset
To spread the word about the initiative an Innovation week was implemented, with events, lectures, workshops, courses, hackathons and the distribution of Risk Boxes, boxes with tools (frameworks and supporting material) for the collaborator to develop, by himself, the first steps of his ideas.
By the end of the first innovation journey, it was possible to see that the collaborators were more involved in the process, which had an important impact in the strategic interests of the company.
The shared knowledge was spread to other levels and sectors of the company, increasing the autonomy of collaborators and making the overall setting of the organization more prone to innovation.
The multidisciplinary nature of the collaborators involved in the journey is worth highlighting, since it brought insights from different areas into the resolution of common problems. Integrated, the groups were able to think, in a collaborative way, about new solutions and how to make them viable.
The very execution of the journey brought several insights to the team, allowing for the proposal of improvements for the next editions. New communication approaches, digital tools, more assertive financial planning and focus on prototyping were some of the selected points to be refined in future journeys.
The project was very well received by the client, who quickly moved so that other sectors of the company could undergo the same process. From the knowledge gathers, collaborators were able to implement their own ideas and help with the development of more assertive internal processes.
Amongst the main deliveries of the project, one can highlight:
- Innovation Journey
- Lectures
- Workshops
- Hackathons
- Trend Reports
- Risk Boxes
