GCOE Of A Global Manufacturing Firm Reconfigured Its Ideation Process To Propel Breakthrough Innovation

Client’s Challenge 

New products, breakthrough innovation, and entry into new growth regions are central to the growth framework of any organization. The global industrial manufacturing firm had set aside a fund to seed ideas in these areas and positioned their India GCoE to play a vital role in this journey.

However, the ideas that were generated at the Indian GCoE did not qualify as breakthroughs, that is, products with a revenue potential of USD 50Mn+ cumulatively, over 3 years. Hence, the India GCoE needed to augment its current process with best-in-class insights, tools, and frameworks to improve the velocity and sale of ideas.

How Zinnov helped 

Zinnov worked with the center’s innovation team and business units to assess the innovation pipeline, identify gaps, and align on changes that need to be made. Zinnov reconfigured and augmented the customer’s ideation process, to improve the velocity and veracity of business cases submitted:

1. Exploration: Zinnov provided market research support by gathering insights and trends in specific thematic areas. Zinnov SME-led workshops and round tables were also conducted to improve employee awareness
2. Ideation: Conducted workshops among employees to enable structured ideation and provide tools to improve the idea prioritization process. Innovation coaching programs enabled employees to identify the critical hypothesis
3. Business Case Building: Primary market research support and ecosystem connects were provided in addition to on-demand research support to validate specific ideas

Impact Created 

Zinnov helped the firm improve the turnaround time to two weeks in terms of the pace for opportunity exploration and ideation. This was attained through early market validation that allowed teams to prioritize efforts and resource allocation in the near term.

Zinnov also spearheaded a market validation study of 16 business cases with a 25% approval rate for funding by the headquarters in a span of 6 months.