Daimler’s Markus Hägele On The Power of Ideas
When you think of Daimler, it’s hard not to think of success. There’s the fact that the Stuttgart-based superbrand owns Mercedes-Benz, the car company that increased its unit sales by almost 10% in 2017, according to Daimler themselves. There’s the fact that Fortune ranked Daimler’s Financial Services division as the fifth best place to work in the world in 2016. But beyond all this, there’s the fact of the company’s continued innovation: the universal charging solution for electric car drivers they developed in collaboration with Hubject or the spot freight app that freightwaves.com reports came out in January to make supply chain communication more efficient and intuitive. Perhaps the company’s relentless creativity is at least partly thanks to DigitalLife@Daimler, a department promoting digitalisation within the automotive giant. We spoke with Markus Hägele, who heads the Digital Life department and who will be speaking at Tech Open Air, to discover how Daimler promotes ideation within the company.
Let’s start with the basics. What does DigitalLife@Daimler do?
We address all the different aspects of digitalisation while maintaining a focus on people — on one hand, the customers: their needs, their expectations, their digital life and on the other hand the employees with their skills, mindset and digital life. We try to promote that across our company.
So far we’ve been very successful. After less than a year, our crowd ideation platform has around 90,000 colleagues using it. You can connect to the platform via your private smartphone or your work computer. This is very impressive, that 90,000 colleagues are bringing in ideas and evaluating other’s ideas and we’ve generated around 2000 ideas globally so far on the platform. One example of an idea we generated using crowd ideation is the pacTris app, which “clarifies whether and how all products and parcels fit in the smart’s luggage compartment.”
And how exactly does Daimler foster such an entrepreneurial mindset?
Through many different activities, like ideation activities where employees can contribute their ideas and experience management’s appreciation, get feedback from colleagues, as they might at our Open Spaces event, a hackathon or an innovation camp, and in one of the various design thinking events we hold around the world. Obviously colleagues shouldn’t just get involved during the event but should also be involved in the implementation of these same ideas afterwards. For me, it’s very important that they feel it isn’t just an event, it’s something where they really contribute and see the success of their own ideas.
Can you tell us a little more about the Open Spaces event?
Usually around 100 employees come and bring their ideas and work for a day to a day and a half developing their ideas further. At the beginning, you collect employees’ ideas on a topic like data or services or mobility services and normally you end up with around 50 ideas and a group of 100 participants works on these ideas together in heterogeneous groups. During the day they’ll evaluate these ideas and shortlist the top ten which will be followed up afterward. Around five to seven ideas will be implemented.
Every single employee has the opportunity to participate, regardless of location — our colleagues all over the world take part. Of course, while everyone is given the opportunity, people have to be motivated and willing to do so and as such, not everybody participates because you have to apply to do so. Afterwards, all Daimler’s employees are able to evaluate the ideas online with our crowd ideation platform, which I’ve already mentioned above. If we come up with around 40–50 ideas during the event, usually about nine ideas will get evaluated on the crowd ideation platform and every employee in Germany will have the opportunity to evaluate it, to give feedback (to contribute with his or her specific know-how related to the theme, for example, data) and to fund the idea with 100 euros.
But it’s not just about our ideation activities. It is also about collaboration, For example we also use “Working out loud” — this is an approach which demonstrates the value of networking without a tool. Employees who don’t know each other well, having different backgrounds or experiences come together, because there’s one thing they have in common: everyone is trying to reach a target within 12 weeks. The group of five people meet once a week and everyone supports each other in reaching their respective targets. Normally it’s possible to reach those targets within the 12 weeks. Why? Because you’re thinking about those targets, describing them out loud and contributing to the networks of the others with your respective networks and experience. This is very successful and we do that intensively within Daimler. We even received an award for that, the so-called HR Excellence Award together with other companies at the end of last year. Even if many people don’t know this approach, it’s very successful and is used within companies like Bosch, Telekom, BMW and also Audi.
How can you future proof your company?
What a question! Of course future-proofing isn’t about just one single factor. We have to address a range of things to stay successful in the future. We use the acronym CASE — Connectivity, Autonomous, Sharing Mobility and Services, Electrified. These four major trends facing the automotive industry, but of course we also have to take care of the technology behind it like artificial intelligence. We also have to take care of the employees involved as much as possible, change their mindset, optimise their skills, change their behaviour to be successful in the future. We do a lot of things to try and bring their mindset to the next level. As such, our participation in Tech Open Air is important to us, not just in terms of external reach but in terms of our own employees so they can see what Daimler is doing, compare this with what others are doing and to be inspired and to bring that inspiration and motivation back home to their departments after the event and to change their way of working a little bit.
This sponsored post was brought to you by Daimler.
Catch Markus in action at Tech Open Air on 21st June where he’ll be discussing “The Power of Ideation and Creative Play.”
This month’s theme is SPEED. We can’t stop thinking about autonomous vehicles, how we’ll navigate the cities of tomorrow and how drones will change the delivery process forever.
