Bricoman
The challenge
As one of the leading retailers in the brick-and-mortar industry, Bricoman considers optimizing customer experience as one of the central priorities of its overarching business strategy. As part of the company's approach to improving customer experience and increasing consumer loyalty, Bricoman was interested in initiating an idea generation program to tap into crucial insights that would inform their consumer strategy.
The company decided to segment the program into three distinct phases which would help them develop a complete and holistic approach to idea generation:
The first phase of the program involved holding focus group sessions with Bricoman’s end users; these sessions were focused on understanding consumer perspectives on the retail experience.
The second phase of the idea generation program involved initiating an internal company challenge to encourage Bricoman’s thousands of employees to contribute with actionable ideas.
For the last stage of the program, the company wanted to launch an external call for startups to help source innovative solutions and technologies which would address key issues.
The solution
For the second and third phases of the company’s idea generation program, Bricoman required an advanced innovation management platform to help facilitate the process of idea and startup submission and evaluation. They choose Skipso as there preferred innovation management software provider.
Utilizing Skipso's Open Calls & Challenges and Idea Management products, Bricoman facilitated the program in the following ways:
- Bricoman’s employees and external startups were able to submit ideas for evaluation by program stakeholders, through a fully-branded online platform
- Bricoman build a customized ideation workflow based on their specific requirements, to take ideas through a funnel of evaluation
- Evaluation scorecards were configured on the platform to help stakeholders evaluate ideas based on predefined criteria
- Teams and evaluators could collaborate on ideas using gamification and crowd voting tools
- Ideas and solutions could be assigned to specific stakeholders for review; ideas could be assigned manually or through the platforms matching algorithm
- Startup profiles were listed in a customized directory
- All users and submissions could be managed from a centralized location, where they could be easily browsed and filtered
The results
Utilizing Skipso’s highly customizable platform to facilitate its idea challenge, Bricoman was able to obtain hundreds of ideas from employees in a short space of time. Combined with the consumer insight data obtained in the first phase of the program, the employee ideas were incredibly valuable in developing solutions which would improve retail experience and operations.
Bricoman’s call for startups, also facilitated through Skipso’s platform, was an incredibly successful phase of the program as well. Around 80 startups made submissions to the challenge. Bricoman selected and partnered with the most innovative startup to work alongside the corporation to develop solutions to improve processes.
By tapping into ideas from many stakeholders, Bricoman was able to generate solutions which addressed the core goals of its program, producing results that helped improve the consumer experience.
