Creating a team of innovation champions at Kimberly-Clark

The Problem

Kimberly-Clark wanted to improve their creative capability. Their core business was facing increasing
competitive squeeze from both the retailers and from significant multi-national competition
Kimberly-Clark were sure that their current big brands and main products were a solid foundation, but needed new thinking to break into long-term revenue and profit growth
They had already experienced the initial benefits of some innovation work within the business but it was now time to significantly increase the innovation capability of the business and create an innovation pipeline for the future.

The Process
Initially a half day session was run for 150 people at the KC International Marketing Conference in the Netherlands.

?What If! had already completed a couple of brand based projects and the good response from both the speech and the projects convinced Kimberly-Clark to invest in creating a team of 24 Innovation

Champions within the business. These were the people who were to become skilled innovators and facilitators of innovation within the business.

This team of future champions were picked from across the Marketing Department – from both the UK and other parts of Europe.

The Solution
The 24 Champions went through a three-part training programme:

Stage I: The Touch course on insight. The team developed their skills in both being insightful and in turning insights into productive actions

Stage II: Productive Creativity. The team then honed their innovation and creativity skills – identifying the barriers that they would need to address both personally and within the organisation

Stage III: Practitioners. Following on from the foundation level courses, this took the team onto creative mastery.

The team could now take on full responsibility for running innovation projects and for structuring themselves most effectively within the business

The Results
Great results have been seen in four key areas:

Improved quality of ideas and insights - seen in the projects run by the team themselves including a highly successful brand repositioning on Andrex
Supportive behaviours and a strong team dynamic have been built. This will see the new behaviours become embedded into the organisation, not just drift and die
Influence is fast spreading beyond the immediate group. Requests are now coming in from many of the other departments for help on creative problem solving. We have extended the ?What If! training to R&D, Customer Management and Marketing Services
Day to day communication has changed for the better - meetings and agendas across a wide range of areas have become more productive

“At the outset I said I would be pleased if 2/3 of the people on the training really took it on board. I really believe that 100% of the people are just so buzzed up by it – and at least 90% will use it regularly.

We’ve run major projects using this. We’ve used it on a significant modification of a brand positioning - Andrex. We’ve developed trade positionings and in-store initiatives. There have been improved launch initiatives from strategic positioning right through to point-of-purchase. These are solid results.

What we have now is a hands on way of doing something that in the past we paid experts to do for us. We now have tangibility, a flexible process that we have the confidence to employ across our business to deliver solutions.”

James Meyer VP Enterprise Insights and Exploration

“For me the success of this project is down to finding enough people with the passion and need to be innovative and then giving them the skills and belief to be able to keep the fire burning. When you have a team of motivated champions who can create their own energy and support the rest of the business, change happens and ideas become the everyday currency of success.”Chris Barez-Brown, ?What If!