How Nestlé’s Intrapreneurial spirit hacked COVID19
Presented By:
Nick de Blasio
Head of InGenius – Nestlé’s Intrapreneuship Program
Synopsis
As the world’s largest food and beverage company, a presence in 189 countries worldwide, and employing 323,000 staff, Nestlé has invested in empowering every Nestlé employee, regardless of their role, to be part of the company’s innovation strategy via InGenius, it’s Global Employee-driven Innovation Accelerator. InGenius crowdsources employee ideas globally against challenges and drives the winning ideas through a lean startup process supported by a dedicated entrepreneurial team to convert them to viable, prototyped and user validated concepts within 8 weeks. The idea owners are additionally coached to pitch their concepts to senior-level executives in return for funding to develop and launch to market within 3-6 months. InGenius has engaged over 55’000 employees and 6500 ideas across 110 countries; 70 of these ideas were converted to viable concepts that have been delivered through the program.
Facing the “new normality” COVID19 meant for the whole Nestlé, InGenius wanted to leverage the Nestlé crowd´s creativity launching a campaign to identify innovative solutions to face some of the new challenges Nestlé employees were facing because of the pandemic such as teleworking, factory maintenance, wellbeing or teamwork. The initiative was a success with ideas coming worldwide and ranging from “Virtual Reality for remote collaboration” to “Grow your own vegetables at home” proposals. Some of these ideas have been prototyped and presented to Nestlé Top Management to be developed further. Nick will be able to share the learning from that great experience.