Corporate innovation
Role: Lab Lead
Duration: 18 months
Year: 2013 - 2015
In 2013, I was offered the opportunity to help build a technology innovation lab for Hershey's. This included creating a structure, budget, success measures, etc.. Sadly, I can't share much of the successes from the lab, given the highly confidential nature of the work...
Identifying Potential Disruptions
Given all the examples of companies being disrupted by startups, one of the first things we did was identify potential disruptions to the business and determine how we should address them - Act, Prepare, Monitor, Deprioritize...
Discovery & Scanning
One of the most important things we did was build a robust business-focused scanning capability, we wanted to monitor relevant changes that were happening in the world... this was everything from consumer behavior to technology changes. We used STEEP (Society, Technology, Economic, Environment, Political) categories to ensure we had a comprehensive view.
One of the technology focus areas we had was Robotics, so I attended a an IEEE conference on Robotics & Automation... here are some of the notes from that conference...
Another item we were tracking were the changes occuring in the media space, including TV, given advertising the company did using traditional media...
Insights & Frameworks
One of the things we wanted to do as part of our work was to educate the organization and help raise the overall digital acuity of the company. We also wanted to codify our work, to create a sustainable, scalable, and repeatable process.
