A Swedish household appliance company revamped its innovation process to enhance interdepartmental collaboration and efficiency. The consultancy firm Googol was engaged to improve communication, training, and culture surrounding innovation, ultimately aligning the strategic process with the company’s organizational structure. The collaboration yielded a more cohesive innovation strategy, emphasizing the necessity of support tools and a conducive climate for effective innovation management.

1. Household Appliance Company’s Innovation process gets reinvigorated
One of the world’s largest household and professional
appliances companies based in Sweden designed a strategic
innovation process that was implemented across the
organization.
The purpose of this process was to coordinate inter
departmental efforts in innovation, ensuring a smooth
workflow that would take ideas to an end-user goods.
Over time, the departments within the company had begun
to adopt their own individual practices. These did not mesh
well with each other or with the overall strategic process.
The management decided it was time for reevaluation and
this is where Googol came into the picture.
CASE

2. What Googol did
Increase
innovation
capabilities
Evaluated and
improving the
strategic process
Improved
Training and
Communications
Implemented
Innovation
Culture Change
Management

3. Googol was tasked with the challenge to assist, facilitate,
improve and re-energize the process.
The desired outcome was a revised process that all
departments could actively engage in, bringing about a
concerted, coherent and coordinated effort to innovate.
The Challenge

4. The red herring
Working closely with a team from the company, we thoroughly analyzed the
strategic process, with an aim of uncovering inefficiencies and opportunities to
better facilitate the departments in their work.
Unexpectedly, it turns out the existing process was largely a good one. However,
we realized that the when the process was designed, it did not factor in the
company’s organizational structure.
Investigating the root causes
We shifted our focus to solving issues that deterred the departments and staff
from being engaged.
A 3-day workshop with key stakeholders in the organization identified these key
problems
● The tool and backend system that supported the process
● The way the process was communicated to the staff
● Need for better governance over the process
● The innovation culture and climate in the company
● The wider strategy for innovation in the company.
The Approach

5. How the process was communicated
It was vital that importance and benefits of the process was
clearly communicated to its customers. Hence, Googol drew
up a communications plan which assessed the company’s
current communication methods, and then recommended
upgrades of existing tools as well as the inclusion of new
channels such as Social Media.
This laid the groundwork for changes that were to come and
generated interest in what was happening. Furthermore, it
served as a platform that allowed staff to find out more and
discuss this strategic revision.
The Solution
The Backend Support
Googol conducted interviews with high level managers and
distributed surveys to other staff that came into contact with
the IT tool. Based on their perceptions of the tool, Googol
drew up a report to suggest changes to the system
infrastructure as well as the user interfaces.
The Process Itself
To align the process with the client’s new organizational
structure, we assisted connect the high-level aspirations of
managers with practical and tangible actions of operations
staff by including a report that was short, summarized and
action-oriented, to be produced prior to the start of the
strategic process.

6. The culture and climate for innovation
Googol also laid the groundwork for assessing the client’s
culture and climate for innovation. We presented key
variables that affected innovation climate and put forward a
challenge to the team: to prioritize their opportunities and to
create an action plan.
And more
Training the customer
It was critical that the staff had the required knowledge and
skills to effectively apply themselves in the process. Hence,
Googol designed and facilitated a custom training program,
and created a unifying platform for different departments
across the organization to engage.
The training was tailored to different tiers of staff: key
managers, primary users and secondary users. Even the upper
management took part of this process to emphasize the
importance of the training program.

7. A Paradigm Shift
What emerged from this intensive collaboration was
both beneficial and instructive. The team began with
the intention of revising a process for Innovation
Management, but came away with much more.
This collaboration clearly reinforced the idea that
Innovation Management was more than a good
process; it required effective support tools,
communication channels, training and climate to
drive and energize the process.
The Result

8. Curious?
Joachim Cronquist, Senior Partner
joachim.cronquist@googol.se
+46 (0)76-165 74 00