In this episode of the Ideas to Life podcast, Esa Nettamo from Digitalist talks with Rashmi Kasat-Majakorppi, the Vice President and Head of Digital Business Development, and founder of the digital garage at Metso, an machinery industry company. Together, they talk about how they manage innovative business development ideas through their digital garage.
The digital garage was formed with the intention to take ideas in the organisation forward. Very often when people are going forward with their day-to-day grind, they don’t have the time to take certain critical ideas forward into implementation. Ideas are generally checked whether they are viable, and oftentimes needs validation from key focus groups.
Rashmi’s biggest lessons she’s learnt over the years is to keep a keen ear to your customer; what they are saying? What are their demands? Demands on their environment surrounding them? Additionally, internally, to have a high performing culture. The internal setup has to perform to the expected standards of customer experiences to even begin thinking about succeeding.
From the digital garage, the overall number of ideas is generally not a problem, it is seen very much as an opportunity to have hundreds. However, Metso down selects, on an annual basis, to 10 ideas to take forward. The decisions are made based on quality and not quantity, as they want to be the pioneers of bringing added value.
To find out how Metso prototypes ideas from their digital garage and further develops them, listen to the entire podcast.