Echos worked with one of the world’s largest and oldest – founded in the 1700’s – manufacturers of pens, pencils, office, art and education supplies to help them foster innovation within their 7,000 employee company and create a positive impact on sales.
The Challenge
To foster and accelerate innovation through Design Thinking. Change mindsets and behaviours in order to enable creative confidence and empower employees to redesign the company’s sales channels.
The Outcome
One hundred company executives were capacitated in Design Thinking, Service Design and Business Design. Through capacitation, they built expertise in using design to solve complex problems and accelerate innovation.
Contextualising The Problem
Our client is a traditional, creative, global company. The brand is respected and loved by clients and partners.
The company is the biggest pencil manufacturer in Brazil with 7,000 employees. Their global presence is also astounding, with operations in 100 countries. Brazil has been their biggest market since 2014, and company leaders felt that they could explore said market opportunities deeper in order to take the business even further.
Executives realised that if they wanted their sales teams to reach their targets in order to accelerate growth, the adoption of a more innovative approach would be indispensable. They also knew that this approach required a mindset shift that encouraged internal behaviours to change.
Sensemaking
Innovation can only truly happen when a change of mindset, acquisition of new abilities and formation of new solutions are combined. Echos worked closely with our client in creating their innovation journey, in which our team capacitated the company’s senior executives and employees through a series of innovation modules, such as New World Context, Design Thinking, Business Design, Service Design, Leadership by Design, Futurism and Emerging Technologies.
After deep-diving into this knowledge, the team was able to apply their learnings – a combination of new mindsets and abilities – to some of the company’s real challenges. As to facilitate the application of their new knowledge, we worked closely with several different departments within the company and created a unique innovation journey for each of them that reflected their specific challenges. The challenges ranged from sales to channel strategy, to branding, to employee experience, amongst many others.
From problem to solution
Our goal when developing this client’s Innovation Journey was:
- Instigate awareness regarding design and innovation;
- Promote repertoire expansion on design and innovation methods;
- Develop the team’s creative confidence;
- Stimulate a protagonistic and intrapreneurial attitude;
- Empower participants to take risks and manage change;
- Shift the operational vision into a more strategic path;
- Create different innovation projects streams to be developed and implemented by the company.
“I have always said, with absolute confidence, that I would like to leave a legacy in this organisation; the Echos team is responsible for this legacy. Two years ago when our CEO spoke about changing the company’s mindset, I had the pleasure of crossing paths with the Echos team and the rest is history. These eleven months of great work left a positive mark in the company.”
Solution & Skills
After conducting three rounds of Innovation Journeys across different areas of the business, Echos has successfully capacitated over 150 executives and employees, as well as developed more than 15 projects, one of which has already been implemented at the beginning of 2018.
In conclusion, our client is now equipped to perform conscious innovation processes and empowered to drive itself to the next level of impact and growth in its most established market.
If you’d like to start this journey in your company, you can check out our in-company upcoming courses as well as download for free our Design Thinking Tool Kit by clicking here.
If you have a special project and would like to use Echos’ consultancy services, you can send an email to contact@echos.cc
