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.
