The challenge

Danish Crown Foods is one of the leading meat producers in the EU, with leading brands in categories such as fresh meat, processed meats, ready-meals and bacon across countries like Denmark, Germany, Sweden and Poland. Following an internal process of defining its Strategic Innovation Pillars for the next two years,our client faced the challenge: how to onboard diverse internal stakeholders regarding this initiative? How to get each critical member of the company to incorporate these Pillars into their daily activities and bring them to life? How to activate innovation around emerging opportunities?

Danish Crown contacted Lantern to develop an action plan that would:

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• Unite all internal stakeholders in their understanding of the focus and strategy linked to each of the Innovation Pillars.
• Motivate and inspire each critical member of the company to identify innovation platforms within each of their areas.
• Harness the collective to prioritize the first few opportunity areas, with real market potential, in core and adjacent business growth spaces.
• Promote anew way of working on innovation internally, avoiding silos and boosting cross-collaboration between areas and across hierarchies within the company.

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What we did

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Together with Danish Crown, we designed and carried out two innovation sprints, based on several agile and design thinking methodologies. The 40+ workshop participants, coming from each of the business areas involved and with hierarchy levels from Junior to C-suite, gathered in beautiful Aarhus to learn about and apply the new Strategic Innovation Pillars through new methodologies (consumer empathy, brainstorming and agile iteration of ideas, rapid prototyping, and more).

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What we achieved

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Through the innovation sprint, workshops and subsequent analysis, we were able to:

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• Disseminate insights and inspiration that reinforced Danish Crown´s strategic focus on innovation looking towards the next few years.
• Facilitate each participant's understanding of the Strategic Innovation Pillars, allowing them the first-hand experience of activating them themselves.  
• Generate a long list of 760+ relevant and on-strategy product and service ideas.
• Sift through these ideas to develop 37 pre-concepts, suitable for exploration with consumers.
• Organize these concepts into 8 high potential innovation work streams for Danish Crown across categories.
• Impact 40company executives.
• Encourage spaces for interaction and connection between departments, from a more open and inspiring (and fun!) culture around innovation.