Innovation process

We helped a leader in the field of animal health to optimize its innovation process in order to instill a new spirit of innovation within its teams.

Alcimed mapped current processes and compared them to innovation models of similar companies in order to rethink and co-develop a new model for idea generation, idea evaluation and project management once launched.

Our team also suggested the creation of an annual trophy recognizing the best contributors of new ideas!

We supported the R&D team of a leading player in the food industry in optimizing its innovation process to accelerate the marketing of its products.

Our client had an innovation process very rich in ideas but internally focused and not very open to an external ecosystem. This constraint generated many limitations, including slow idea characterization and feasibility checks.

By conducting a benchmark of existing open innovation practices in the industry and leading a series of workshops with our client’s teams, we identified and implemented actions to use external partners at various stages of the innovation process in order to accelerate the different stages and thus the marketing of product innovations.

Our team assisted a pharmaceutical player who found that his innovation process was not agile and efficient enough. We first exchanged with our client’s teams to get a detailed understanding of what was working well and to identify the malfunctions of the initial process.

Then, we identified inspiring cases from industries outside healthcare but facing the same issues and we defined the guiding principles of the new process to be implemented. With this material, we organized a “Sprint” bringing together about twenty representatives from the various departments and functions involved in innovation, in order to co-build the new model following the precepts of Design Thinking.

Ultimately, this work enabled us to co-construct with our client’s teams their new innovation process, more focused and more agile at the same time, allowing more disruption and empowerment of the teams!

We worked with a major player in the aeronautics industry who wanted to develop new digital services, and who could not afford the very long traditional development times in aeronautics for this kind of innovation race! Everything had to be created from scratch: the process – from idea generation to prototype development -, the places, the people involved and the way they had to interact with each other, etc.

A real innovation factory was born! We tested the new approach by supporting the teams on the first 3 ideas, and we also developed user guides, training materials and all relevant models, so that our client can now run it alone and efficiently.

As part of an internal ideas competition, we helped a leading pharmaceutical company to select the most promising projects and bring the first proofs of concept (PoC) to fruition.

During the first phase of this project, we supported management in the selection of projects. A great deal of work was done to define appropriate criteria for evaluating the ideas proposed by employees, and subsequently the format in which these ideas should be presented. A selection committee then met, and three ideas were selected. The next challenge was to define how the winning teams would be supported, so that they could develop their ideas into projects, right up to the proof-of-concept (PoC) stage.

Thanks to our pragmatic approach, this internal ideas competition was able to deliver real results and enrich our client’s innovation pipeline.

Alcimed helped the innovation unit of an industrial client to revitalise its innovation performance.

After an initial diagnostic phase, we identified 4 main areas on which to focus, and co-constructed governance, methods and action plans to launch a dynamic within the community of innovation referents. We also created an Innovation Playbook and organised Learning Expeditions with other manufacturers to get inspiration.

The outcome of this assignment was the identification of 10 actions to be implemented to optimise our customer’s performance, 9 projects launched, 1 community of Innovation Leaders created, and a culture of innovation disseminated and integrated by the various business lines at operational and management level.