Nestle's approach to Innovation:
Leveraging open Innovation and Digital Platforms
As a part of Global Innovation Roundtable Summit 2017 held in Copenhagen, Valerio Nannini who is Nestlé’s head of strategies and performance, has shared some of his insights on innovation culture and the role of digital platforms in the innovation journey.
Nannini recounted that innovation has always been a part of Nestle, since its inception, such as personalization of food products. Nestle uses traditional methods such as consumer research at market level and global level as well as feedback from customers as methodology to figure out what people need.
The stakeholders at Nestle believes that basic capabilities or skill set required for innovation game are connecting with the right people, trying things out and get insights from them before creating a strategy and finally creating the strategy itself. Nestle believes in people diversity for their innovation project teams – people who are able to bring in ideas, people wo translates these ideas into tangible things, people who create strategies and people who executes these strategies contribute the diverse group in Nestle.
Nanninni specifies on the importance of Talent, Culture and Capital for creating an environment where innovation can thrive better. Clarity & good sense of governance with good stakeholder management, creating a coalition of people with similar ideas and capital to run and execute these ideas are the key factors behind creating an innovation culture.
Nanninni also spoke about digital innovation and digital platforms. The key idea behind digital innovation is to start from the smallest denominator i.e. to start from the basic level. Aggregating data, decomposing data, getting insights from the data and execution are the basic steps behind every digital innovation journey. Since there is no single platform for digital innovation, different platforms are required at different verticals. Nanninni concluded his speech by specifying that innovation should not be limited to the product, but has to be done throughout the enterprise.
