Novozymes
Building an innovation team from scratch
Building new capabilities in Novozymes Future Fuels & Chemicals. Most large organisations build specialised innovation teams to incubate new business creation. Oftentimes, the teams are not 100% dedicated, and almost always, they’re not co-located. This means that the team’s way of working - its process and decision-making tools - become critical. In this case, our client wanted to build a simple and effective set of process steps, tools and set a strategic direction to ensure traction and focus in early phases of innovation. In highly practiced environments with experts on the teams, one has to be careful with adding prescriptive and cumbersome process. Our approach was to de-scale complexity and co-create a minimum viable set of engagement rules for the innovation team that allowed for fast feedback, continuous prioritisation, and meaningful collaboration.
Too Good To Go
Designing B2B2C experiments to reimagine customer experiences.
Too Good to Go, a global scale-up company on a mission to fight food waste, connects suppliers (restaurants and retail) and consumers with a digital app to create a channel for food that would otherwise be thrown away. As part of developing the brand, Too Good to Go wanted to explore new ways of using packaging (bags) to celebrate the fight against food waste and the people who share their values. In a company with exponential growth, keeping the entrepreneurial behaviours in day-to-day business is a challenge. For a scale-up, staying curious is as necessary as executing on a stable business model.
Novozymes
Testing consumer products for a B2B business. Making a corporate startup go agile.
In B2B it can be difficult to get consumer market validation of new products fast. The final product is not developed and what you’re selling is only a part of the complete product that consumers will experience. In this case, we facilitated interventions into the Novozymes business in order to design and sell the complete product. Using pretotyping methods, the products became very concrete, allowing us to measure consumer behaviour based on a systematic approach. This leads to faster decisions and lower risk. Interventions are 50% of what we do in Unlikly, because lasting impact is only achieved when such interventions start to become part of the culture. That’s why we’ve worked with different teams in Novozymes to embrace new ways of working with innovation, building experimentation into business as usual. By carefully combining practices from the agile world and the world of lean innovation, simplifying existing business processes, and working with leadership on direction and metrics, we achieved higher focus and productivity in early stages of innovation.
Dansk Industri, Microsoft, and Energinet
Designing a cross-sector open innovation programme for green energy digitalisation.
Denmark is a global leader in production and development of green energy, and we have set ourselves ambitious climate action targets. However, green tech innovation is not developing fast enough: Investments have stagnated over the past 10 years, and green energy exports are not growing as fast as expected. The energy sector has been slower than other industries in leveraging digital technology and making use of data to create new products and services. Therefore, the Confederation of Danish Industry, Green Power Denmark (then Danish Energy), Microsoft & Energinet came together with the goal of creating a platform for green tech innovation, with the mission of making Denmark a leading player in green tech innovation, similar to the global market leadership we own in green energy.
Energinet
Shaping corporate-startup collaboration within energy transmission and smart grids.
Even organisations with a mature innovation culture are struggling with making big bets. Energinet, placed at the centre of the green energy transition, wants to lead the way by being more audacious in their efforts. The future sustainability challenges are wicked and they won’t be tackled by solving known problems one step at a time. Unlikly helped reimagine and redesign Energinet’s Open Door Lab, a catalyst for green transition, to embrace impact innovation and align with a broader ecosystem of collaboration partners. Since being more courageous means accepting failure, we also combined innovation portfolio management with longer-term futures. This allows Energinet to pursue radical opportunities without making up-front strategic decisions.
Cool Copenhagen