InGenius, Nestlé’s Employee Innovation Accelerator
InGenius is a global employee-driven innovation accelerator and develops projects to foster innovation, agility, and entrepreneurship inside the company, with 50,000+ internal entrepreneurs to share their innovative ideas to solve business challenges.
The InGenius team was set up like a lean start-up functional team to spearhead the beginning of the start of these projects. This meant that someone that can wear multiple hats was essential in the role. I took on the role as an Innovation Manager, and focused on User Experience (UX) and overall Project Management.
Role & Duration
UX & Innovation Manager
UX Design, Service Design, Project Management
2017 - 2019
Core Activities
Workshop facilitation, Design Facilitation & Planning, Sprint Planning, Pitch Coaching.
Countries
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Switzerland, Germany, Canada, United Kingdom, USA
Sector
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Food & Beverage
Project Types
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Digital, Services, Chatbot, IoT, Supply Chain, eCommerce, New Foods
Finding Innovation within a Problem
The InGenius Journey starts with creating access to the 500,000+ employees of Nestlé to join an open innovation challenges in one of the business units of Nestlé (HR, Supply Chain, R&D, etc.). These users are challenged to come up with a solution to a specific problem they were facing in a certain space. From there, other employees and users would comment and vote on the problems and solutions that they wanted to see become real. This is how the selection was made into the top 3.
When the InGenius team picks up the problem statements and solution ideas, there is no design, only a problem statement and a description of the solution idea. So then the Design Thinking workshops and research begins. The team expands the idea to key people within the business, leveraging the InAcademy toolbox and clear process developed.
From that research, there is a lean prototype developed, a plan, costing structure, and a hypothesis with metrics to test.
Opportunities & Outcomes
The goal of this process was to shape the end-to-end user experience—grounded in research and brought to life through prototypes, testing, user flows, and launch plans that set R&D and development teams up for success post-funding and post-boardroom.
InAcademy Playbook: Designed and launched a step-by-step guide to the InGenius process, complete with links to templates and resources. With teams constantly changing and members juggling multiple projects, this became the go-to place to kick things off faster and keep everyone aligned.
Building a Kick-@$$ UX Team: The magic was in bringing together people with deep expertise in one area and enough knowledge across others to really lean on each other. It created a team that worked smarter and delivered stronger.
Breaking Barriers with Project Management: By blending design know-how with project management, the handoff to development got a lot smoother. Requirements were clear early on, and dev teams had the bigger picture, which made the whole process easier from start to finish.
InGenius 2017
Driving Employee Innovation. Fail fast and innovate!