Enabling a leading Latin American Retailer to build successful Commercial Partnerships with Start-ups

Challenges Faced by the Latin American Retailer

The Strategy and Innovation team of a well-established, leading Latin American retailer, aimed to accelerate their digital transformation and sought to partner with start-ups to co-innovate. However, while operationalizing the co-innovation strategy, the team encountered a few key challenges –

• Difficulty in identifying, aligning, and prioritizing use cases for co-innovation, with internal teams
• Timely search for relevant start-ups in the identified areas/use cases.
• Aligning support functions and engineering teams to facilitate rapid onboarding of start-ups and increase the pace of experimentation.

How Zinnov Helped

The Zinnov team adopted a two-phased approach, commencing with the design phase, where we formulated the playbook for co-innovation, and subsequently, moved on to the operational phase.

In the design phase, Zinnov developed a set of assets for the Innovation team –

1. A comprehensive framework for identifying and prioritizing use cases, along with an operational plan detailing how the framework would be implemented by the retailer’s engineering teams.
2. A 4-step framework for scanning and selecting relevant start-ups.
3. An onboarding process for the innovation, engineering, and functional teams within the retailer’s construct, to ensure quick definition of the experiment’s scope and initiation of Proofs of Concept (POCs).

Over the course of the following year, the Zinnov team worked closely with the Strategy and Innovation team, to facilitate effective collaboration with onshore business leaders, offshore technology teams, and legal and compliance departments, thereby resulting in an increased pace of experimentation.​

Impact Created

Throughout the 18-month engagement, the client approved 17 POCs across verticals, such as Digital Commerce, Logistics, and Fintech. 9 POCs have been successfully completed, and the client has chosen 2 of the participating start-ups for implementation at scale, across markets.

*To protect the privacy of our clients, names have been changed. The results, however, are 100% real.