Filling the innovation pipeline of a marine technology company with visionary business ideas

The client, a leading international company in the field of marine technology, wants to develop new, visionary business ideas and at the same time establish a new form of innovation culture. This was planned as a highly participatory process in which the "young potentials" and higher management levels were supposed to have an active part from the very beginning. The project started with a series of management interviews, in which also members of the executive board took part. The aim of the interviews was to find out what the management team thinks about the future and what they deem as the core competences of the company. But instead of creating a simple "competence map", specific "superheroes" were designed for each of the nine core competencies that were identified, in order to make them more tangible. Parallel to this, trend analyses were conducted in different industry fields and value creation areas, in order to identify future innovation potentials. In a two-day "Future Lab" in the offices of Z_punkt, all work streams came together. Jointly with the young potentials and managers, ideas for promising new business opportunities and growth fields for the company were generated in an inspiring setting based on the content that had been produced so far. After this, Z_punkt developed bold and easy-to-digest future profiles for the ideas in the form of “Future Worlds”. The ideas were then fed into an online challenge, in which the employees of the company had the opportunity to evaluate the ideas, develop them further or get inspired for coming up with their own new ideas. The ideas that received the highest ratings from the employee community were then presented and discussed in a two-day “Future Event”. Actors dressed as the (competence) superheroes were specially hired for this event, giving the discussions a particularly inspiring touch. The best ideas were then fed into the company's innovation pipeline.