Development of Innovation Capabilities

Any company that wants to develop innovation capabilities and establish an “innovation friendly” environment must first communicate and establish the right behaviours as part of the company culture. Our “BEACONS” model helps companies motivate and adopt innovation behaviours, and create an open and challenging environment that embraces change and simplification and ensures support and traction for the development and implementation of innovative ideas.

In a world that requires faster and bolder innovation in business models, products and services, processes and channels, Kairos Management can help you identify your needs and opportunities, create an innovation oriented environment, develop the right employee behaviours, provide expertise and training in innovation and creativity tools and, in the end, ensure the creation of an innovation system where ideas are created and implemented.

Creativity Facilitation

A global leader in plastic materials was struggling with direct material costs. Materials accounted for 60-65% of total production costs, which hurt the company’s profitability and competitiveness in the marketplace. We helped them through a series of creativity events come up with the optimal formulations for several hundred products with a 30-40% cost savings.

We help you boost creativity by introducing creativity tools and techniques in your organisation, both for individuals and teams, and by facilitating creativity sessions focused on generating ideas or in finding “out of the box” approaches to solving recurring problems: organisational, or process, product or service related.

Product and Process Innovation

We supported the R&D team at a home appliances company in developing an innovative equipment, in defining the processes for the design and validation testing to ensure quality and performance of the new design, and in developing new customer service processes to support the new product once in the market.

We support you in focused innovation projects on your products and processes. Or in establishing an NPI (New Product Introduction) methodology and governance that ensures an effective business leadership of any ‘innovation’ project, be it the engineering, development and commercialisation of a new product or service, the implementation of a new process, or the development of a new IT application or system.

Involvement of management & Coaching

A large multinational company in the energy sector wanted to deploy a group-wide Operational Performance initiative. We worked with top management in each division to:

Assess the division’s operational maturity and the organisation’s readiness to change.

Organise workshops to share and discuss Operational Performance principles, develop a common language, establish a vision for an operational performance initiative, understand improvement levers, identify critical success factors and define a roadmap.

The most critical factor in any Operational Excellence or Innovation initiative is getting proper understanding, commitment and traction from the business leadership team. We engage with your executive leaders to gain their commitment, train them on the initiative principles and methodologies, and coach them through the initial roll-out and execution to ensure adequate understanding and support.

Organisational Change Planning

We worked with the newly appointed technology director at a medium sized construction materials company to identify the root causes for poor operational performance and lack of an excellence mindset, to define the training needs at management and operator levels, to execute the trainings, and to establish the organisational structure required to support the operational excellence initiative.

Once the leadership team fully understands and supports the initiative, we help you diagnose how suitable your current organisation is for implementation, design the adequate organisational changes required for a successful roll-out, define the training and support needs at all levels and design the process for organisational implementation and initiative roll-out.

Change Acceleration

A leading pharmaceutical company wanted to ensure adequate support at all organisational levels for a new operational excellence initiative. We worked with them in a diagnostic, in defining a common message to send across the organization highlighting the issues and the future vision, and in establishing a communication strategy to engage everybody in the initiative, its progress, results achieved and next steps moving forward.

The success of your operational excellence or innovation initiative will be much more dependent on its acceptance and support within the organisation, than on how good the design and planning is. Through our Change management methodology we can help you with the critical steps of acceptance and acceleration, creating the need for change, defining and communicating the future vision and driving organizational commitment.

Governance

One of our consultants co-led the improvement initiative at a division of a large multinational, jointly with the Business Unit General Manager. In this role they put in place mechanisms to identify specific opportunities, establish KPIs and set objectives. They also managed a portfolio of actions, carrying out project reviews, ensuring adequate application of the methodology and monitoring progress and results.

Our team can help you drive your initiative, provide the support your teams need throughout the roll-out and project execution, create a rhythm, push for results, and ensure the principles and methodology ultimately become part of the company culture and way of working.

Evaluation of Digital Maturity

Using our Digital Maturity matrix we will work with you to determine your current state: how digitally mature are your internal processes, your technology and your people. What is the digital maturity of your competitors and how is your market segment evolving? Is your operating model set up to support your strategy? Do you have the right competences?

Creation of Transformation Map

Based on your digital maturity and how "digital" fits into your strategy we determine together with you what your digital ambition should be: improve or transform; and create a high level transformation plan and break it down into actionable parts - to initiate the transformation journey

Definition of Bi-Modal Strategy

Explore new business models and new digital opportunities has to be done in a way that it does not endanger the existing income-generating business: the challenge companies are facing is to have structures that allow them to operate in a parallel mode, both "exploring" and "exploiting". We support you in setting these bi-modal structures up and integrating them into your transformation roadmap

Digital Transformation

·     Digital Transformation Program Office

·     Governance of the Digital Initiative

·     Cultural Transformation support

The Digital Transformation of your company will be successful if agile principles are applied: creating multiple transversal teams that work in an autonomous manner towards the transformation goals and combining a bottom-up approaches with a top down strategy in a critical balance are the challenges that you will be facing.

We work with you to create the right "mechanics" when you initiate your Digital Transformation or we work with you, in case of an ongoing initiative, to "re-focus" an ongoing transformation towards the strategic goals of your company.