Transform your employees into innovation ambassadors

Offline printing continues to prove its added value in more ways than one, but is evolving as an extension of digital services. Add to this the growing interest in the phenomenon of the metaverse and you must come to the conclusion that innovation is the answer to all this. INNI GROUP, known for professional printing, but also famed for the authentic tear-off calendar "De Druivelaar", partnered with INNDUCE.me partly for this reason.

"We are at a point where we need to refocus with INNI GROUP so that we have an answer ready for the rapidly evolving and consolidating printing market," says Sales and Marketing director Steven Vandevoorde. Moving fast is the message if we want to remain relevant as a company in the long term. That was also the challenge for myself to come on board of INNI GROUP in February 2022: to take on that transformation challenge."

2025 as the horizon

INNI GROUP opts for a dual strategy: on the one hand, a defensive one, by continuing to serve current and residual markets through acquisitions, for example; on the other hand, an offensive one, by developing new applications in function of future-oriented markets.

"This ambition means that we must be able to identify and test the innovative applications that can take us forward smoothly," he continues. "But with 2025 as the horizon, we have little time, so we have to avoid at all costs projects that lead to nothing, or that we don't address properly. For that reason, we introduced the INNDUCE.me innovation platform and approach, helping us to market our innovations faster and in a more efficient way. To bring that to fruition, we need to know that our people have sufficiently strong and, above all, complementary innovation skills."

Not only top-down, but also bottom-up innovation

"The past had already taught us that only top-down innovation doesn't work. You have to create a working environment, the famous “innovation culture”, to innovate together with your employees and thus start feeding them bottom-up. Very specifically, we made an appeal to employees who wanted to voluntarily participate in the INNDUCE.me test, based on the twenty innovation competencies it screens. That way, not only would they gain insight into their capabilities, but we as an organization would know much better & objectively which people with which competencies we need to bring together if we want to innovate efficiently."

In the end, 24 out of 110 employees volunteered to take the INNDUCE.me innovation test to map their current level of innovation skills in an unbiased and objective way. As a next step, they will now also take a year of online training offered through INNDUCE.me's online platform. "The idea is that this will allow our employees to further master their innovation competencies and thereby sharpen their innovation profile," points out the Sales and Marketing Director. "In a year's time, they will take the test again on a voluntary basis in order to check to what extent they have evolved in terms of innovation."

Strike while the iron is hot

Whether any surprising conclusions came out of the tests, we are eager to know. "The positive finding was that we already have a lot of innovation potential amongst this group of employees," Vandevoorde replied. "The surprise was mainly in the innovation profiles assigned to employees we might not have immediately expected. In short, innovation is everywhere, in everyone and in every function. That diversity was a real eye-opener for us. So we had to strike while the iron was hot and asked INNDUCE.me to organize two interactive workshops around generating creative ideas - so-called ideation. INNDUCE.me provided this hands-on creativity workshops together with Dirk De Boe from Creashock, experts in creativity, innovation and transformation. Meanwhile, we have already initiated the first projects, bringing together complementary profiles in one team. We are fully confident that the chances of success are high, thanks to the knowledge gained on the innovation profiles."

About INNI GROUP

INNI GROUP, headquartered in Heule near Kortrijk, is a Trends Top 20 Belgian graphics company for professional printing. In addition to its activities in niche markets for tickets, vouchers, security documents and calendars - such as the authentic tear-off calendar De Druivelaar - they can be contacted for all administrative and commercial printing. In addition, with their platforms INNIwise and INNIsure, they operate as publishers specializing in Well-being at Work, Prevention and Environment and, with the OKAPI platform, offer a tool for a hybrid marketing mix in which online and offline communications complement each other seamlessly. For more info, visit https://www.innigroup.com/

INNI GROUP nv | Industrielaan 5, B-8501 Heule | +32 56 36 32 11 | info@innigroup.com