V-ZUG smart living and home innovation
How will consumers cook and wash in the future? How can smart products and services create more quality of life and usefulness in the home? What might an ecosystem look like in this context – and what challenges will this pose for appliance manufacturers? Such questions formed the starting point and focus of the innovation sprints that Milani worked on for the leading household appliance manufacturer V-ZUG.
Identification of new business potential in the smart home
During the first sprint, an interdisciplinary team from Milani created a diverse range of future scenarios and a portfolio of potential smart washing and smart home offers for V-ZUG. Based on technical and social megatrends and with the aim of creating compelling customer propositions, Milani used out-of-the box approaches to design a variety of incremental and radical household-related product, service and business model concepts.
Validated new offers through prototyping and testing
After this unconventional approach and its surprising results aroused interest at V-ZUG all the way to management level, the project went into a second sprint cycle. Supported by Milani both in terms of methodology and content, an interdisciplinary V-ZUG team further developed the most promising concepts in the weeks that followed. They built prototypes, tested them with representative user groups and evaluated the technical feasibility and economic potential of the new solutions. At the end of the projekt, the sprint team presented the results to the Executive Board and the Board of Directors based on validated assumptions. As a result, the team was given the go-ahead for further funding.
Building internal innovation expertise at V-ZUG
These initial innovation sprints at V-ZUG were so successful that Milani went on to actively support ten further co-creation sprint cycles, in terms of content and methodology, over the next three years.
The direct and intensive collaboration between the V-ZUG team and Milani enabled a transfer of knowledge and methodology expertise, which gradually built up innovation capability. Thereby, Milani was able played a significant role in the development of today’s independent “V-ZUG Innovation Lab”.
