A collaborative approach to accelerate innovation at Nestlé
InGenius is Nestlé’s employee-driven innovation accelerator, an initiative focused on incentivizing employees to share their innovative ideas and on providing support to make those ideas become a reality in a short timeframe.
Taking advantage of the creativity of the more than 300,000 employees working for Nestlé across the globe, InGenius’ goal is to provide a fast-track to innovation, delivering in a few months solutions with the potential to enhance the quality of life and contribute to a healthier future.
Through a crowdsourcing platform, the initiative enables employees to share their ideas to not only receive feedback in the form of votes and comments, but also attract colleagues that would like to join their team. Ideas with the highest popularity go through an expert panel to assess the business potential for the company and, once selected, go through the incubator phase to develop the business case and prepare the entrepreneurs to pitch for funds. In case the idea is funded in the boardroom event, the InGenius team guarantees the delivery of the minimum viable product within a short period of time.
Founded in 2014, InGenius grew in 2017 its impact to 40,000 employees, coming from 110 countries, who collaborated on more than 700 ideas posted on the platform during the year. As a result, 14 new solutions were developed through not only the application of cutting-edge technologies, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and virtual reality, but also the creation of low-cost water sensors focused on saving water and increasing farmer’s income and the design of new business models to bring new competitive advantages to Nestlé.
The video below summarizes the main achievements of InGenius in 2017:
Mark Schneider, CEO of Nestlé, has said that his favorite definition of entrepreneurship is the “pursuit of opportunities beyond the resources currently controlled” and, in 2018, the InGenius team will keep contributing to the change to a opportunity-driven mindset inside the company.
