Challenge:
Our client is a global leader in mobility solutions, providing full service leasing and fleet management services across 43 countries and manages 1.70 million vehicles worldwide.
However, in Belgium growth has stalled, with margins under increasing pressure – typical case for a mature market with similar competitors’ offerings. Moreover, emerging trends are threatening the core business: changes in tax regulation related to employee car benefit, ban of diesel cars in big cities, emerging urban mobility solutions as alternative offerings to cars and increasing working from home companies’ policies.
Our team has been briefed to help differentiating the value proposition of the core business to better respond to changes in customer needs and behaviors, as well as to explore growth by targeting unaddressed customer groups.
Approach:
Our team was asked to apply the Blue Ocean Strategy formulation. The project stakeholders wanted to use this opportunity to also strengthen people’s capabilities by embracing new innovation processes and tools, and by shifting their mindset towards innovation. As a key success factor, we had the full buy-in and support from the board, since this innovation project was fully aligned with the corporate strategy.
A heterogeneous project team was created, with 10 innovation champions representing all relevant business functions, led by the innovation manager.
The process had 4 phases, each consisting of a workshop and fieldwork for customer development and experimentation. It started with understanding the As-Is situation and analysing the gaps, continued with exploring new opportunities for value creation, then converging into creating various prototypes and testing.
Results:
Started under normal circumstances, the project moved completely online because of the COVID-19-related lock-down measures. However, thanks to the great online collaboration tolls available, our work continued with the full engagement of the innovation team. For workshops and internal meetings we used Klaxoon and Mural, as visual collaboration spaces, while the customer interviews were conducted via the phone or video conferences.
From the several value proposition prototypes created, three “adjacent” innovations were selected and pitched to the Board of Directors for feedback and investment decision. All three gained full support and are scheduled in the next year’s project charter.
In addition, the process revealed many other areas for improvement or opportunities for incremental innovations, five such initiatives having been launched.
Project info:
- ALD Automotive
- Diegem, Belgium
- Corporate Strategy
- Service Innovation
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