The fourth day of our preparatory seminar was all about innovation and creative thinking. After three days of listening to fascinating and inspiring speeches, the fourth day was more dynamic and active. Our delegation was able to participate in workshops, organized by our platinum partner Accenture and our gold partner Swiss Post.
Innovation Lab and workshop at Accenture in Zurich
Andreas Volz, Accenture
Today, we visited Accenture in Zürich. First, we had a short presentation from Andreas Volz about Accenture. We learned that the company has over 500,000 employees in more than 120 countries. They are active in more than 40 sectors. Accenture consults in its five divisions Accenture Strategy, Accenture Consulting, Accenture Digital, Accenture Technology, and Accenture Operations most of the fortune 500 companies and this successful over long periods. Most of the biggest clients from Accenture are with them for 10 years and more.
Andreas Volz told us that they have locations in several Indian cities. India is one of the two places where Accenture scales its business. Over one third of the employees are in India. Mister Volz told us a little bit about Accenture’s working culture. He works in different teams all the time. There were even staff members who he met today for the first time. Accenture did also switch from a strict suit culture into a company were more casual business clothes are suitable. This shows how agile Accenture is.
After the introduction we went into the topic of innovation which was the reason for our visit of Accenture’s innovation lab. A consultant presented us how innovations are made at Accenture.
An example was shown in a video clip were a cruise ship company made their holidays smart with thousands of sensors. This with the intention to offer all the costumers an individual holiday experience. Every customer gets a badge were all his data are collected and with this he can also pay the bill in the restaurant on the boat. To make this invention, certain employees of Accenture were able to go on cruises to learn about the behavior of the costumer and to see how an innovation can be developed and implemented.
Delegation of Focus India 2020 actively listening to Accenture’s presentation
Collecting ideas during the workshop
After the theoretical part we went into a case study: the delegates were split into six teams and together with a consultant from Accenture, discussed a theoretical case. The case was about a fictional company in the field of agricultural machines. That company aims to find a way to expand its product line away from the role as only being a machine manufacturer. To find new products, the teams analyzed one out of three personas which was either a farmer from Switzerland, the US or India.
After the collection of the most important information such as the gains, pains, and wishes of the company’s customer, every team member had to come up with ideas of how the pains can be solved through a new business model. The next step was to present the ideas to the other team members and to cluster similar ideas together. After the discussions of the different ideas, the creativity technique called «dotmocracy» was applied and every team member had to give two votes to select the best ideas. Subsequently, a model has been used where one fills in the name of the concept, the addressed needs, the description, impacts and benefits, the requirement, and finally the business model. After the completion of the model each team presented their ideas in the plenum.
– Written by Nik Ulrich and Emanuel Graf
Espace Lab and workshop at Swiss Post
Swiss Post is the swiss mailing company which operates in several different branches such as traditional mailing services, banking, and public transportation. Swiss Post occupies around 58,000 employees and is one of the biggest employers in Switzerland. The Swiss Post mainly faces two challenges: the decline of letter quantity (in 2017 it was -3.7%), and the current e-commerce boom.
This boom in e-commerce which is dominated by big companies such as Amazon or Zalando is especially challenging because these big players have immense bargaining power while Swiss Post at the same time must expand its infrastructures to accommodate the increased volume of parcels. Due to the decrease of letter writing in todays digital world, mailing companies such as the Swiss Post have to find new and innovative business areas. There are several initiatives created by Swiss Post to achieve this goal.
Firstly, there is the so called ‘Early Label’ which, instead of the normal governance rule uses a reduced governance that ultimately is aimed at facilitating a simpler way to collect new ideas from internal sources rather from external ones. The Swiss Post also initiated a funding for start-ups which are carefully selected following all due diligence steps.
Presentation of Swiss Post
Dynamic Workshop
In 2018, managers of Swiss Post travelled to India in order to learn from their business making. Indian Post is the most widely distributed network in the world and is also very active in finding new innovative ways to do business and collaborates with start-ups in India. By exchanging with the Indian Post, Swiss Post sees how other companies in different countries deal with economical and social changes in todays environment.
We further learned new terms in order to understand Swiss Post’s new products and services such as Internet of Things, service on demand, order on demand, and smart logisticts.
Internet of Things is neither about the internet nor about things, it is about the provision of digital information and the use of new processes. Their goal is to improve customer relations, workflows, and offering new services. The biggest challenges companies face, however, is the willingness to change within the company. IoT is composed by hardware, software, communication, cloud platform, and cloud applications, which all need to be used in a manner which is efficient and creates new features. In the IoT centre lean innovation is the main priority, 80% is rapid prototyping and conception and 20% is technical consulting. Swiss Post doesn’t think in technology, they think in use cases, which basically translates that when the time is ready for a solution, they will develop the product.
Service on Demand: The traditional facility management processes take a lot of time to resolve a problem, that is why Swiss Post developed a new feature which automated the process by a push of a button and ultimately saves time by 20% after only 6 months of introducing it.
Order on Demand: Swiss Post has developed many new services that aim to improve the ordering systems in other companies. Another example for Order on Demand is the new solution for households that are located in remote areas, where the traditional solution was a physical sign that needs to be put on the letter box and signals the post employee that a post service is required, this however is not an efficient solution. Swiss Post therefore developed an IoT device where the service can be ordered with the push of a button on a tech stick.
Our delegation member Wilhelm presenting the results
Visiting Post’s Espace Lab
Smart logistics include features such as tracking parcels, or they are making use of old features that can be transformed to have a new smart function. At Swiss Post, the prime location of the yellow mail boxes are utilised to transmit an emergency message from the Federal Office in case of a national blackout. Another example of smart logistics is Intelclean, which basically shows in an interactive way and in real time where in the building cleaning is required.
Overall, Swiss Post aims to understand and find the current opportunities and pain fields of their customers. They follow a simple rule: «People don’t buy a tech solution, they buy a solution to a problem». The employees at Swiss Post are the most important resource and in 2020, the top three skills sought after are complex problem solving, critical thinking, and creativity. This is why the collaboration with student projects such as Focus India is so immensely crucial.
– Written by Martina Hespelt and Jasmina Velupillai
After the revealing presentation of Swiss Post, our delegation got the chance to actively participate in a workshop and find new and innovative ideas for a new business model of Swiss Post. Our delegation did a great job and presented their ideas and how a possible application may look like. Not only did we hear a lot about new technology, our delegates were also able to try out virtual reality glasses. At the same time, we had the pleasure to visit Post’s Espace lab where new and innovative ideas are developed and executed.
