Quorn

Quorn’s Marketing Director approached us as she felt there was a need for the general approach to innovation within the company to be more customer focused.

NPD responsibility sits with a number of teams in different departments and geographies and the company has some clearly defined short and long term innovation platforms and a recently developed robust stage gate process.

What was felt to be lacking though was an appreciation of the importance of insight in the NPD process and the tools and understanding of creative thinking in innovation.

We have a suite of proven innovation tools that we use on projects ourselves and have used in previous training as well as training exercises and case studies.

However as every company and their challenges are slightly different from each other our training is generally bespoke and so we spent some time immersing ourselves in the business to understand what the senior team’s vision of success was from the training and the level of current understanding and capability within the team

We then developed a one-day bespoke course which involved a mixture of theory, best practice examples and lots of hands-on practice, plus a lot of fun!

The training focused on three main elements; releasing your innovative mindset, developing deep consumer insight and developing innovative concepts.

We delivered the training to 20 very enthusiastic Quorn colleagues in a lovely barn hotel in Yorkshire. The venue choice and way we decorated the room was in order to take attendees away from their normal working life to release their creative potential.

Feedback from the training was overwhelmingly positive both from the attendees and senior team who saw the difference in their teams.

The next step was to develop an innovation toolkit for Quorn based on the training. Copies of this were distributed to all those whose roles even slightly touched on insight and innovation, but were unable to be there on the day.