Objectives
Our focus was on increasing productivity through open innovation i.e. the deployment of startup technologies for the purpose of solving problems that have a negative effect on production.
Approach
Spyre’s approach relies on the collective genius and personal drive of innovation agents that take the potential value of startups for the organization and lead what is in essence an innovative venture which uses that technology as a solution to a problem.
The first step was to train innovation leaders that can lead such startup-based ventures from inside the company. Their familiarity with company’s internals along with their personal knowledge and skill allows them to effectively drive such ventures forward in ways that cannot be paralleled by a central team or someone external to the company’s operations. The Spyre team supported an Innovation Leaders Community Management program to maintain a strong community of innovation leaders with innovation activities and give them an ability to support each other and act as a community.
Applying Spyre’s Innovation infrastructure along with the Corporate venture blueprint tool and the SMART pilot proprietary approaches were at the core of all activities.
Since the company already had best practices of working with startups, the Spyre team adjusted some of the terminology and practices in order to accommodate.
We have been running the Innovation Technology Deployment Program twice a year where a cohort of problems are assigned with a startup that can solve them and request approval to run a SMART pilot. During the execution of the pilot the Spyre team offers a SMART Pilot Mentorship Program making sure that the pilot doesn’t get stuck in the common pitfalls we have observed to be typical for such pilots. In order to get decision makers engaged and committed we ran a periodical Executive Innovation Program in order to make sure that decision makers who are the internal clients of innovation understand their role and are committed to it.
In some cases the work with successful startups opened opportunities for the client to actually invest as the work served as a CVC Foundation
Key insight: It became very clear as we were searching for solutions to the specific problems presented by the field and backed by decision makers that effective scouting must also look at other fields and avoid maintaining a narrow focus only on the industry the client is part of. Some of the best solutions we were able to identify came from general manufacturing and not necessarily food manufacturing. In some cases solutions came from completely different fields.
Outcomes
The main metrics that saw significant improvement during the activities supported by Spyre:
o Number of evaluated startups
o Number of validated business models based on startup technology presented to decision makers asking to run a SMART pilot
o Ratio of approved SMART pilots out of options considered
o Ratio of successful SMART pilots out of the total number of approved SMART pilots
o Total potential impact of approved SMART pilots on productivity and profitability
.svg){kind=icon}
