Case Study

Embedding customer-centric innovation to drive better solutions.

Blackmores needed to embed a structured approach to innovation to enable a more customer-centric and agile approach as well as a mechanism for seizing innovation opportunities that sit outside of traditional New Product Development.

Innovation

We worked with Blackmores to enable their people to solve problems and produce better solutions by embedding a customer-centric innovation process and equipping their people with the tools to explore innovation beyond product

Trained over 140 Innovation Champions across Australia and Asia. These Champions play the role of doing innovation but also coaching and facilitating others through Blackmores’ best-practice approach to innovation

Conducted an Innovation Maturity Index to understand Blackmores’ baseline performance on the nine key drivers of innovation

Developed and implemented an organisation-wide centralised innovation process

Engaged the broader Blackmores community in building innovation capability by running innovation workshops at the annual supplier conference, attended by over 150 of Blackmores’ suppliers

Delivered expert innovation mentoring to Innovation Champions to support their application of the innovation toolkit and process to Blackmores-relevant projects

Our Approach

Here’s how we did it:

The Blackmores leadership team adopted a strategic and customer-led approach to achieving growth through innovation. This has enabled them to produce better solutions that solve real customer problems.

With the formal launch of the Blackmores Game Changers program, employees from diverse teams such as IT, Finance, Quality & Regulatory and Sourcing ask what problems need to be solved for customers and began contributing to innovation at Blackmores, rather than innovation being confined to Marketing and NPD teams.

A physical space – the Blackmores Game Changer Lab – was created. This Lab serves as a simple environment that has the tools to lead innovation workshops at the fingertips of the employees within Blackmores.

And here are some specific project outcomes from FY19:

Here’s how it helped:

By putting Inventium’s approach to experimentation into practise, Blackmores was able to get an early read of customer behaviour on a new product idea, generating savings in research and production costs, and invaluable time.

Through running experiments on the Blackmores Subscribe website, revenue from subscriptions have more than doubled in twelve months. Subscriptions now contribute significantly to online sales.

After observing health care practitioners and speaking directly to them to understand their frustrations, the Blackmores Institute have been able to better serve pharmacists, increasing traffic to their website by over 600%.

The Blackmores team in Thailand made substantial savings in production costs by creating an MVP to test various product options around ‘product authenticity’ directly with customers.

In collaboration with another multinational consumer goods company, Blackmores ran an idea generation workshop using Inventium’s tools and process. This led to two marketing ideas being taken up by a major retail customer. Testing these ideas delivered an increase sales volumes over an eight-week period and secured an ongoing strategic partnership.

The Blackmores leadership team adopted a strategic and customer-led approach to achieving growth through innovation. This has enabled them to produce better solutions that solve real customer problems.

With the formal launch of the Blackmores Game Changers program, employees from diverse teams such as IT, Finance, Quality & Regulatory and Sourcing ask what problems need to be solved for customers and began contributing to innovation at Blackmores, rather than innovation being confined to Marketing and NPD teams.

A physical space – the Blackmores Game Changer Lab – was created. This Lab serves as a simple environment that has the tools to lead innovation workshops at the fingertips of the employees within Blackmores.

And here are some specific project outcomes from FY19:

Here’s how it helped:

The Blackmores leadership team adopted a strategic and customer-led approach to achieving growth through innovation. This has enabled them to produce better solutions that solve real customer problems.

With the formal launch of the Blackmores Game Changers program, employees from diverse teams such as IT, Finance, Quality & Regulatory and Sourcing ask what problems need to be solved for customers and began contributing to innovation at Blackmores, rather than innovation being confined to Marketing and NPD teams.

A physical space – the Blackmores Game Changer Lab – was created. This Lab serves as a simple environment that has the tools to lead innovation workshops at the fingertips of the employees within Blackmores.

And here are some specific project outcomes from FY19:

“Working with Inventium is amazing and inspiring. Everybody is knowledgeable and uses their experience to guide us while building internal capability. We have had savings of over 100k by using their experimentation methodology, whereas in the past we would have just launched the new product.”

Blackmores