New Ways to Collaborate: How Local Inspiration Encourages Global Innovation
For the second time, 50 Porsche innovation managers from all over the world came together for a week to identify and initiate new projects. Since the 2020 kick-off, the innovation managers have been working on fostering collaboration and integrating innovations from local markets into their global planning. They aim to exchange experiences with one another and implement new ideas for customers. Lars Krämer, Team Lead Innovation and Methods talks about international cooperation and the importance of different perspectives.
Porsche is a global icon. From California to Shanghai to the German Black Forest, the passion for Porsche connects the people who drive our cars. They all have a shared interest but hold different world perspectives, experiences, and desires. To jointly develop Porsche’s pioneering spirit, we combine global innovation with local inspiration.
In many places around the world, our innovation managers are working to develop Porsche’s experience and implement new ideas for our customers. Last year, the international group met for the first time at our “Innovation Week” in Stuttgart and Berlin. In April, I organized the second international exchange with my colleague and fellow innovation manager Christoph Acker and my teammate Johannes Schmitt. This time, digitally.
Local inspiration for global innovations
Which people are driving a Porsche, what values are important to them, and what innovations they want varies from region to region. Porsche is in a successful place, but we have to be conscious of the fact that our target groups evolve and that the people who will buy our products in 20 or 30 years will have a different mindset. The understanding of luxury is already changing within younger generations. Time spent with friends and personal health becomes more important, they ask of companies to change something for the better.
As innovation managers, we face the challenge of tailoring solutions for local markets without losing the global scale. We work on approaches that solve challenges specifically for local markets that reflect their differences. Our Asian customers’ strong interest in the local and international art scenes lead to ideas of how this desire could be addressed in both retail and lifestyle products. For the western markets, we are working on new concepts to turn test drives into a personal and unforgettable experience for new, young, female customers. In European markets, we have come up with concepts for a data-driven approach and created a personalized experience at the Porsche Center.
Global cooperation throughout the innovation process
These examples show how we gather solution ideas from the markets and jointly review, improve or further develop them at our headquarters in Germany. Global collaboration and knowledge in our markets enable us to understand changes on both a large and small scale and to transfer them to our products. While public charging stations are the standard in Japan, for example, German Porsche drivers charge their Taycan more often in the garage. From such insights, we can develop products and services that improve the respective experience.
Furthermore, different markets allow us to test our pilot products more precisely. Where can we best test the scaling potential? Which country offers interesting rates of early adopters to gather data on future products? Collaboration between our headquarters and locations around the world runs both ways — and offers a lot of potential for all aspects of our work.
Coming together and challenging our ideas in the global Porsche innovation community is only the beginning. We establish global collaboration formats throughout our entire innovation process. From ideation, concept, pilot to potential pivots and scaling: Our mission as a community is global innovation — with diverse perspectives from around the world.
Lars Krämer is Team Lead Innovation and Methods at Porsche AG
About this publication: Where innovation meets tradition. There’s more to Porsche than sports cars — we’re tackling new challenges, develop digital products, and think digital with a focus on the customer. On our Medium blog, we tell these stories. It’s about our #nextvisions, smart technologies, and the people that drive our digital journey. Please follow us on Twitter (Porsche Digital, Next Visions), Instagram (Porsche Digital, Next Visions, Porsche Newsroom), and LinkedIn (Porsche AG, Porsche Digital) for more.
