A Global 500 Retail Major unlocked an innovation-first mindset within its workforce

Client’s challenge

A global 500 Retail major, during the inception phase of their innovation program, wanted to establish the right processes to facilitate employee-led innovation. These processes were to be set up while keeping in mind the unique construct of a technology organization. The client wanted to foster an innovation-first mindset and build the necessary skills to translate it into long term value for the organization.

How Zinnov helped

The Zinnov CoNXT team partnered with the client’s Strategy Team at their India GCoE to understand the goals to be achieved and the outcomes to be delivered. Hence, the CoNXT team took a two-phased approach to outline the blueprint for the program. The first phase was the Design phase, and the second was Implementation.

During the Design phase, the team devised a program structure that defined focus areas and KPIs, a robust governance structure, a growth path, an L&D curriculum, along with a sustainability model. Once the program blueprint was ready, for the implementation, the team worked with the BU heads, product managers, and strategy leads to set up skilling, sourcing, and experimentation mechanisms at various innovation stage gates. Employees were encouraged to take on self-paced courses, that enabled them to come up with ideas, which were then sourced through a quarterly, BU-focused hackathons. The ideas so collated, were then experimented on in customer experience labs and spark box environments.

This structured process helped the client prioritize use cases, enable small-scale deployment and testing to check for product-market fit, which then enabled large-scale international deployment across the client’s stores.

Impact created

The CoNXT team had carefully designed the strategy to ensure spend, effort, and time optimization to add value to the client. The program provided clear pathways from the idea to deployment, and also ensured that there was a clear pathway for it to organically evolve, post the partnership concluded. This Zinnov playbook has been validated through the deployment of 6 ideas that are at various stages of deployment in the client organization. In addition to this, 10+ ideas are in the pipeline that the client is exploring. Furthermore, the client has also evangelized this playbook in other global locations, with the India GCoE running global hackathons.