Business case 4 – Accelerating Innovation

Situation: identifying and aligning the people from different competencies and locations into one innovation project.

Approach: more than 170 relevant knowledge areas and 150 experts were identified thereby improving internal and external collaboration with strategic partners.

Result: Improved cross-functional collaboration, knowledge retrieval and team selection. Increased bargaining power by better channelling external partners.

The Kraft Heinz Company is a leading food and nutrition company and a platform for performance and leadership in the global food industry. Research and development´s key focus is to be meeting their current and future customer demands for food and nutrition.

Kraft Heinz is committed to create food that is purely natural as part of their vision ‘To Be The Best Food Company, Growing a Better World’. Kraft Heinz has invested heavily in innovation and has a large European multidisciplinary team in place to achieve progress and realize breakthrough innovations. All available competencies are represented in this team, e.g. research, production, marketing, legal, etc. Most of the internal experts also have external collaborations and knowledge partners with whom they collaborate. This wide variety of people and competencies involved has a huge promise for fast and effective innovation if you manage to get all of them aligned.

But, the company´s challenge was how to align the people from different competencies and locations into one innovation project?
Kraft Heinz realized the big benefits in connecting and combining the individual knowledge networks of the different participating colleagues and competencies for this innovation project.

With our technology, we ran a team accelerator analysis for the entire innovation team. This analysis takes limited time from the team and provides immediate results. During the analysis, more than 170 relevant knowledge areas and 150 experts were identified. These were connected to more than 2500 knowledge endorsements.
The results were presented as an interactive network and knowledge guide. The knowledge guide is used for (future) knowledge allocation. The resulting knowledge network gave a broad overview of the available knowledge and enabled visualization of different analyses such as key-man exposure; internal-external knowledge balance and core competence analysis.
With the results of the analysis, collaboration improved thereby optimizing the development time and strategic collaboration partners in the external network could easily be identified.

Figure: The total knowledge network with the 170 knowledge topics in red and the 150 experts in blue. The size is relative to their importance. Just at a glance, you can see the core team.

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