Challenge
The Valen Group was hired to assess the innovation development and go-to-market activities of a global 100 food & beverage market leader. The company was known for being a slow but might multi-national and wanted to improve its competitiveness with smaller, faster rivals to launch innovation in key global markets. The Corporate Innovation Team wanted to learn and deploy best practices for how to launch and manage global innovation initiatives.
Approach
One of the major challenges of the global market leader was to improve speed-to-market across markets and geographies and provide guidance on how to improve the global coordination of innovation being a large, complex organization. We conducted a benchmarking study of other global leaders based upon The Valen Group’s best practice model for global coordination and decision-making. Using the study as a benchmark, we could assess current practices in key global hot-spot regions to provide us insight into opportunities for improvement in organizational structure, decision-making and process improvement.
Results
The strategy developed by the Valen Group, became the Company’s Global Innovation “Accelerator Team” who helped strategic global launch leaders get innovation to market smarter and faster. Understanding the limitations of the current organizational structure and sharing Valen’s best practice findings allowed strategic business unit leaders to improve decision-making and coordination. These improvements to their global business have been recognized by the CEO and executives as the key to accelerate speed to market and as generating better competitive results. The results of the Accelerator team to drive global innovation improvements was touted in the public company’s annual report.
