Driving Open Innovation: Lantmännen's Greenhouse Success Story

• Lantmännen is an agricultural cooperative owned by
  18,000 Swedish farmers. It is a leader in Northern Europe in agriculture, machinery, bioenergy, and food. They have 10,000 employees, operations in over 20 countries, and an annual turnover of SEK 65 billion.
• Lantmännen is founded on the knowledge and values acquired through generations of farmers. With research, development, and operations throughout the value chain, Lantmännen takes responsibility from field to fork. Some of their best-known food brands are AXA, Bonjour, Kungsörnen, GoGreen, FINN CRISP, Schulstad, and Vaasan.
• The Greenhouse is Lantmännen's open innovation program, which they run using Orchidea's challenge and workshop features.

10 years of collaborative innovation

Lantmännen believes in the power of open, collaborative innovation and has pursued it through the annual Greenhouse Innovation program. The Greenhouse started in 2014 as an internal campaign and has grown to its current form by learning from past experiences. An essential part of its success story has been senior management's commitment to developing innovation capabilities and culture.

The purpose of Greenhouse is to nurture and cultivate ideas that may not have the opportunity to grow in the fast-paced day-to-day. In its current form, Greenhouse consists of innovation challenges, workshops, intensive development of start-up ideas in Hackathons, and internal idea refinement through the Accelerator model.

As most activities are now carried out digitally, engaging and functional digital tools are increasingly important. Lantmännen found a solution to meet their diverse needs in Orchidea.

Nina Tuomikangas, who works closely with Greenhouse, describes Orchidea's role:

”Orchidea enables the engagement of Lantmännen colleagues and external network. And efficient management of larger scale activities and the high volume of ideas involved."

Creating innovation challenges with Orchidea

The 2023 Greenhouse was the third one organized with Orchidea. The theme changes every year, and this year's theme was the reduction of production side streams. It was launched with a communication campaign in print and social media.

Through active communication, ideas were sought both internally and from external networks such as start-ups and researchers. The challenge feature of Orchidea was used to collect ideas. Tuomikangas was pleased with Orchidea in organizing the challenges.

"We got to use the new updated version in the challenges and received good support from Orchidea for building and sparring the challenge."

The challenges were opened up separately to internal and external stakeholders to target the questions more precisely. Ten challenges were launched on different topics, five for internal and five for external stakeholders. Despite the number of challenges, the smoothness of managing them was surprising.

”It was surprising how effortless it was to set up and monitor the challenge. There were 10 of them, and we were afraid beforehand that it would become unfeasible. But it was just the right solution, completely manageable and user-friendly."

The Greenhouse program had raised much interest in previous years, so the team expected many ideas. According to Tuomikangas, it was essential to pre-screen ideas to avoid devoting excessive time to evaluation. They first decided to use a quick yes-maybe-no method to screen the ideas and focus the more detailed strategic criteria-based evaluation on only the most exciting ideas.

”We were nervous about the number of ideas we'd receive and how to evaluate them in Orchidea. We got great support from Orchidea and trained the stakeholders for the process."

It was vital for decision-makers to familiarize themselves with ideas early on to establish ownership of ideas and choices. Establishing ownership increases the probability that ideas will be taken forward and real change will be achieved. Orchidea has been a great help in this, according to Tuomikangas.

"One of the biggest strengths of Orchidea is that it is easy to get stakeholders from different business areas to evaluate incoming ideas and ownership emerges at an early stage."

AI workshops as part of the Greenhouse

Since the pandemic, the Digital Innovation Day workshops have become an established part of Lantmännen's Greenhouse program. Lantmännen wanted to make the digital workshops more inspiring and tried the Orchidea AI workshop immediately after its launch. One of the concerns Lantmännen had beforehand was data security.

”A high level of data security is very important to us. It was great when Orchidea's AI solutions aligned with our security guidelines."

The workshops aimed to be creative and inspiring for a large group of participants, so finding the correct format was essential. Mikko Lehtonen from ICG Innotiimi, whose expertise played a vital role in the workshop's success, created a suitable workshop process.

"We established a clear role for AI at different stages of the workshop process. We found a simple solution where AI drastically accelerated the development of ideas and activated the participants' own thinking - increasing the quality and quantity of ideas developed. AI-assisted workshops need to be well facilitated, and the role of AI in the group needs be taken into account."

Tuomikangas and Lehtonen sought a balance in the number of AI ideas in the workshops. Based on experience and feedback, they developed a suitable model. Once they found the right approach, AI was an excellent support for thinking while allowing room for individual creativity.

It created an inspiring atmosphere in a challenging digital environment, stimulating creativity. Over 70 participants joined the workshops, creating over 600 seed ideas. The feedback from the participants was enthusiastic, and Lantmännen was pleased with the final results. Tuomikangas describes the AI workshops:

”In a digital environment, it is important to find a truly inspiring atmosphere where participants can generate ideas without being constrained by digitality. We accomplished this very well in our workshops."

The crucial development phase in traditional workshops is often less exciting than brainstorming and often neglected. Tuomikangas felt that Orchidea's process and AI supported this well.

”This process resulted in higher quality and further developed ideas."

Towards upcoming innovation campaigns: tips for the future

Lantmännen has learned a lot about best practices in open innovation campaigns through experience and participants' feedback. They are already building the next Greenhouse campaign and plan to run it with Orchidea. They value Orchidea as a constantly evolving platform that Orchidea develops in cooperation with their customers:

"It was really great to be heard when identifying development needs in Orchidea. Some of these were immediately passed on to the development team and some were resolved in the longer term."

Based on their experiences, they also shared their best tips for successful campaigns:

• Choose an unambiguous problem that requires a solution and for which there is a real business need. Without a genuine need, even good ideas won't move forward.
  
  

  ”The clearer you can describe the problem and the more urgent it is, the better the ideas will be and the faster they will move forward."

   

• You can start small: you don't need a big development team and program. Even a small group of participants with different backgrounds will succeed:
  
  

  ”Even with a small team you can create excellent results if you have people with different roles, skills and backgrounds."

  
  
• It's also fun to organize open innovation, so go ahead and develop a way to do it.

Organizing and developing the Greenhouse include:

Nina Tuomikangas, Lantmännen Group, R&D Team Innovation

For more information on the Greenhouse program, please visit: https://www.lantmannen.com/research-and-innovation/the-greenhouse/

ICG Integrated Consulting Group helps its customers use AI in innovation.