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Verhaert Innovation AcademyVerhaert Innovation Academy
Verhaert Innovation AcademyVerhaert Innovation Academy
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Moving mountains: tackling e-commerce challenges with a multi-discipline team

Case studies

Verhaert Innovation Academy works with a specialist chemical company which is renowned for bringing industry-leading solvents and surfactants to market, working with a network of manufacturers, distributors and retailers worldwide. 

In a high-volume, hyper-competitive market, the process of developing products which are ready for customers to bring to market is a challenging one. And, added to this, this company’s customers have a specific issue around e-commerce. Cleaning products are typically heavy and bulky, difficult to store and expensive to transport – and therefore don’t deliver high-profit.

The Verhaert Innovation Academy approach to fast solutions

To help solve these problems, Verhaert Innovation Academy supported a talented, proven, innovation manager as he embarked on a 12-week ideation project in Singapore. Together, they built a focused SWAT team with rapid idea creation, to come up with a number of product concepts that could ultimately help solve persistent problems with online sales. 

This team turned the received innovation wisdom on its head. No longer would a specialist ‘innovation team’ be in charge, removed from the general business – but now a cross-business team with diverse expertise took the reins. This supports the idea that innovation can come from anywhere within a business – and that it is attitude, rather than specific experience or qualifications, which is important. This team shared common traits which made them ideal for an innovation challenge: an aptitude for fast thinking, the ability to be comfortable with ambiguity and change – and the desire to challenge established thinking. 

There was an initial slew of 15 ideas, all of which had been designed to fill the brief of being portable, high-margin and high-volume, in order to fulfill the e-commerce hole in customers’ business model. Verhaert Innovation Academy’s expert mentor Caroline Hooft-Slootweg was brought in to help whittle down the ideas into those that were most likely to work. Caroline’s experience is extensive. She was Unilever’s first-ever global head of digital marketing and new media where she helped some of the world’s biggest brands (Knorr, Dove, Becel, Lux, Ponds) make sense of the digital space. And it’s this experience which was so valuable to the team.

With Caroline’s help, all the ideas were tested in Singapore with customer interviews and by hitting the street, then whittled down to around seven ideas which were further developed. At this stage, visual mock-ups were made by a sketch artist in order to bring the concepts to life.  The ideas were only presented to the board at a midway workshop, by which time there was also a business model attached to the ideas – detailing how they might impact on other products or business processes. We know that ideas can’t exist in a vacuum – firms have to consider the impact on the business and its other work – and it’s here where many siloed innovation projects fall down.

Moving forward 

Once the two most promising ideas were chosen, the process continued to move quickly.  Where more information was needed, the team built landing pages with proposition information, did more testing in Singapore and took advice from consumers as to what was appealing (or otherwise) about the products. Importantly, at no stage was a traditional research agency used, but instead, the innovation team did the research itself, trimming the fat from a lengthier innovation process favored by many.

Within six weeks, the final two products were ready to be developed for the market. But even at this stage, the team didn’t listen to received wisdom – which tells firms to adopt a ‘hoarder’ mentality, to hold onto their IP and to protect it from rivals. Instead, this organization is collaborating with manufacturers and other parties to pool their expertise and to build the best product possible.

Want to learn more? Check out our innovation programs or get in touch! 

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Verhaert Innovation Academy is part of Verhaert Masters in Innovation, a pioneering innovation group helping companies and entrepreneurs to innovate, creating new products, businesses and services.

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Jan Kennedy, Founder


Location: Munich
Speaks: English, German
Specialty: World of Corporate Entrepreneurship
Fact: Created 1 Billion Dollars of Value as Intrapreneur at Intel

Jan Kennedy is an expert for Intrapreneurship program design. As founder of Academy for Corporate Entrepreneurship (AfCE) he overseaw the design and implementations of various Intrapreneurship Programs covering different stages of the Innovation Process for many Fortune 500 organisations. He is also a Director at the Founder Institute, the world’s largest mentoring program for early stage entrepreneurs launching over 1,000 companies per year with a 72% survival rate.

Born in Germany, grown up in the UK and lived and worked in Silicon Valley, Vienna, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Munich, Jan loved working with AfCE’s team of diverse global mentors. He can be found on stage at Intrapreneurship or Innovation Conferences or down in the trenches with corporate startup teams testing and validating critical assumptions. Jan also runs an investment fund focused on startups and crypto currencies.



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Narjeet Soni, Product Development Director


Location: Berlin
Speaks: English
Specialty: Agile Product Development

Narjeet is a a serial entrepreneur with his latest start-up valued at € 1.5 mil within 2 years. He is the founder and CEO of Lean Apps GmbH and acts as Head of Product Development at AfCE where he supports all of our participating teams with the AfCE Prototype Fund and Incubation Development Fund. He was also a Scrum Master at Infosys and Adidas.

Currently, he is focused on helping companies go through their Digital Transformation journey. Narjeet has been working with startups to learn, the ways of working that keep them agile and fast paced and has been implementing those learnings in the enterprise. He has successfully implemented Lean Innovation in Retail, Automotive and Insurance companies and has worked as an Agile Coach, Product Owner, Project Manager and Business Consultant as well as a Software Engineer at various Retail and Telecom customers.



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Aernout van Heusden, Business Development Director


Location: Madrid
Speaks: English, Spanish, Dutch, German
Specialty: Business Development
Fact: Been living and working outside the Netherlands for more than 25 years

Dutch born and a Spanish resident since 1999, with a wealth of experience in International Business Development & Sales within various industries and (mainly EMEA) countries. Senior background as entrepreneur, director, and as independent consultant having done projects (70% of those relating to Business Development and Sales) with start-ups till established multinationals.

Networker, public speaker, tech (SaaS, PaaS, Mobile, AR, Smart City) savvy, structured and loves working on solving company pain points.



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Maria Isabel Becerra-Noll, Finance Manager


Location: Munich, Germany
Speaks: English, Spanish, German, French
Specialty: Finance manager
Fact: Worked for the company that produced the Netflix series “Narcos”

Maria Isabel has more than 10 years of experience as Financial Analyst and Business Development Manager in a wide variety of industries. She is originally from Colombia, where she was born and raised. She has lived in Paris, Boston and now Germany. Maria Isabel holds an MBA from Babson College, the number one school for Entrepreneurship in the world.

Before moving to Germany in July, 2018, Maria Isabel worked in Bogota as Business Development Manager for the world’s largest infrastructure company, VINCI. In this role she was responsible of searching new concession projects and leading Due Diligence processes to acquire new concessions. Before this she worked for another infrastructure company, as well as a film production company and a marketing agency.

Maria Isabel is passionate about finance and numbers, enjoys working in teams and seeing the results of hard work.



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Stijn Smet, Managing Director


Location: Antwerp (BE)
Speaks: English, Dutch
Specialty: Innovation strategy and program design
Fact: Performed live on stage in front of 30.000 people

Stijn is an expert in innovation strategy & management. He consults various R&D and C-suite leaders in designing their innovation program and underlying governance structures. As the Managing Director at AfCE, Stijn can build on his pragmatic experience of heading corporate accelerator programs at Fortune500 clients.

With over 12 years of experience in innovation consulting, he has been leading Verhaert’s business innovation team where organizations and intrapreneurs were supported in developing their breakthrough products and services, from ideation all the way to market launch.

Stijn is a regular speaker at innovation conferences and co-authored the book Building Tomorrow, a pragmatic and systematic approach to tackling innovation challenges in the public sector.



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