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Off-Road Challenge
February 23rd, 2021
Off-Road Challenge Accelerates Innovation
Living in a VUCA world requires new ways of thinking and new ways of developing products. Open innovation is key as well as listening to more ideas than just to the ones coming from a few specialists. The world is changing so quickly the need to shorten development timescales is becoming more important. Innovation today requires creativity, agility and of course a lot of speed. So the question was: How can we speed up our own innovation process?
Sowing the Hackathon Seed
Back in 2015 Saint-Gobain Bearings started to answer this question with a new initiative: the Off-Road Challenge. Working with external experts and some internal explorers, 214 ideas for our business were generated in less than 48 hours! During an exciting new brainstorming event, cross functional teams formed from different areas of the businesses and the world, looked at vehicles which had been stripped down to their constituent parts.
But innovation isn’t just about ideas: it’s about bringing them to reality, so back home in our CreateLab in Willich Germany, the top 20 explorers had three weeks to do some research and prepare a short presentation of their idea. The top 5 ideas were voted for and the 20 explorers plus 40 volunteers (Makers) started building their ideas. They had again 48 hours to bring their idea to a testable product including a business pitch back to the business.
Our video shows how we went through this process and how our volunteers made a big difference:
Fast-forward to 2020
The Off-Road challenge was a great way to experiment with agile working practices and collaborative innovation to speed up our development process. We realized the power of this and started using it with selected customers honing the process to one that delivers physical results in a matter of 2-3 days. Our hackathons involve 2-3 selected experts from Saint-Gobain (depending on our customer’s challenge) who work along-side our customer’s product development teams at one of our FabLabs to turbo charge their product development. If you want to find out more check out our hackathons service page.