Unilever

Building an internal accelerator with Unilever

We set up a 12 week accelerator programme for a FTSE 100 FMCG business, bringing their most promising disruptive innovations to market faster, while embedding smarter ways of working into the organisation.

Context

Innovation is key to delivering growth for this global FMCG firm. It wants to achieve this through new products and services, channels and business models, for both existing and new brands. The business aim is to identify winning solutions to real consumer problems, and bring them to market quickly, while upskilling teams along the way.

Solution

T-minus collaborated with the firm’s R&D function to design and deliver a 12-week accelerator programme. Combining the best of design thinking, lean startup and agile principles, T-minus trained and coached teams through a challenging experiment-driven entrepreneurial process. We went from problem discovery and confirmation – through ideation, prototyping and testing real products with consumers – to finished product in weeks, instead of years.

Result

From dozens of teams entering the process, only the strongest, most validated products are launched into the market. 100% of participants felt it was a valuable experience, which helped them make rapid progress. The combined mindset and skillset development, alongside business impacts, led to T-minus codifying and scaling up the accelerator programme.

“We made progress that would have taken months, we focused on early adopters & persona, we validated / disproved many risky assumptions that we also wouldn’t have done otherwise” (accelerator team)