August 2024
Planned Creativity: Shaping VMT’s Innovation Culture
Ideas often strike spontaneously and in unexpected places – whether during coffee breaks, car rides, or walks. However, this is not the most reliable approach for creating innovations.
Only when we cultivate, manage and implement ideas in a targeted manner, innovations are born. At VMT, we have a pretty cool system that makes us calculably creative. Here’s an overview of how ideas transition from the brainstorming whirlwind in our innovation centre, Hive1, to reality underground:
Cultivating ideas:
In addition to our innovation hub, Hive1, where ideas spontaneously emerge, we seize every opportunity to gather insights from our staff: Guest lectures, innovation scouts, and brainstorming sessions encourage us to think beyond conventional boundaries.
Managing ideas:
We’ve devised an online form to capture essential details about these ideas, ensuring that creative sparks aren’t lost but swiftly channelled into our innovation pipeline. Thus, each of us can easily become a contributor to our pool of ideas and a visionary.
Realising ideas:
While some ideas may dazzle us from a technological standpoint or push the boundaries of feasibility, the critical question remains:
Does our customer truly require it, and can we deliver such a product to market at an acceptable price?
To confidently navigate this aspect of innovation management with a customer-centric approach, we’ve established the PDP (product development process). This structured framework for planning, development, and production ensures that only the most promising ideas transition from concept to reality
The Hungarian American Nobel Prize winner Albert Szent-Györgyi puts it in a nutshell: ‘Innovation means seeing what everyone else sees but thinking what no one has thought before.’
That’s why we at VMT don’t leave innovations to chance.