Innovation strategy consulting

Our client, an American pharmaceutical group, requested the support of our team to define their open innovation strategy in Europe in order to facilitate their collaboration with European start-ups and researchers.

After having studied the possible collaboration opportunities envisaged by our client (mainly focused on the search for new therapies and R&D techniques), our team carried out an initial mapping of the European hot spots and clusters in the biotech field. In a second step, we carried out a benchmark of the most innovative open innovation approaches implemented in Europe by other players, in healthcare and in other sectors.

Based on the information gathered during our investigations, we organized a workshop with our client’s team in order to co-construct together the best open innovation strategy to implement and define the main steps for its operational deployment.

We assisted a leading pharmaceutical company that wanted to bring its teams together around innovation to develop new products, new services, new market access models and new ways of working; all in a special and unique place. We decided to generate this new momentum by imagining the creation of an “innovation laboratory”, a physical place “apart”.

Through an external benchmark and internal workshops with a dedicated project team, we defined its operational functioning and roadmap and then organized the first events taking place in this new laboratory with employees now ready to innovate!

We created and launched a one-off challenge of external open innovation for an energy player wishing to boost a new innovation model in the field of robotics.

Our teams assisted our client in defining the synopsis, writing the rules of the game and the technical specifications, identifying the financing methods, up to the launch of the challenge. About thirty teams responded to the challenge at the international level, but only one team won!

We carried out a benchmark of open innovation practices and approaches in the industry in order to define the model for the future accelerator of a public institution.

Our team analyzed the open innovation practices of the most innovative industry players (Lego, IBM, P&G, Apple and Starbucks) and explored their strategies, approaches, methods, resources, partners in their ecosystems and business models.

The results of our study have inspired our client and facilitated the decisions to be made regarding the model of its future accelerator.

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 accompanying the first 3 ideas, and we also developed user guides, training materials and all relevant models, so that our client could now run it alone and efficiently.

We supported the R&D team of a leading player in the food industry in optimizing its product 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 time-to-market of our client’s product innovations.

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!