The platform that gives structure to innovation in a fast-growing company
City Green Light is an ESCO based in Vicenza operating across Italy. It designs and manages public lighting and smart city services for the public administration: sensor networks, smart parking, management of installations across the territory.
In recent years the company has grown significantly in revenue, with a core business built on multi-year public tenders. Innovation was entrusted to a team of two people, who were already doing scouting and experiments, but without a shared environment to keep track of them.
Information about innovation was scattered: known startups, business unit needs, internal ideas and experiments lived in separate files, emails and conversations.
What was needed was a single environment to bring everything together: mapping needs, collecting and classifying startups, managing scouting and following its progress through to experimentation. A point of reference that would make the process repeatable and measurable, instead of starting from scratch with every initiative.
City Green Light adopted blendX, the innovation management platform for running innovation processes end-to-end. The work moved along two tracks: mapping needs and scouting solutions.
Interviews with the business units led to the collection and classification of innovation needs, then translated into a portfolio of three priority challenges: making the most of data with analytics and AI, smart building management, and people engagement and retention.
On this basis the platform structured the scouting: import of the startup database, with data enrichment and classification for each challenge; construction of a navigable startup portfolio, with profiles, notes and relevance criteria; progression from portfolio to long list, through to the short list of companies to engage; and management of the experimentation phase, from the bootcamp working sessions to the first PoC hypotheses.
The platform also hosts an idea management module, intended to collect employees’ innovation proposals and feed the internal engagement challenge.
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