Fortum

Fortum is a leading energy company from Finland and one of the cleanest power generators in Europe – with a strong Nordic focus. As a significant player in the energy industry, Fortum stays ahead of the competition by relentlessly prioritizing innovation and development. With a long history of investing in internal innovation activities, the company has developed and executed multiple innovation programs driving the development of new ideas.

In 2022, Fortum partnered with Reaktor to take their innovation challenge for Fortum employees, Innovation Boot Camp, to the next level. In close collaboration with their innovation experts, Reaktor designed a program allowing Fortum to accelerate innovation and provide grounds for people to pursue new ideas within the organization.

In organizations as large as Fortum’s, innovation often gets buried within the complexity of everyday business. Employees have great ideas but don’t know how to push them through the corporate landscape. Current roles and responsibilities often prevent people from jumping into other ideas or projects, and the experts needed to bring these ideas to the next level are scattered throughout the organization. 

Companies understand the need for channels and structures that promote innovation and empower employees to pursue ideas, but making that need a reality is another story. This is where innovation programs come into play. Initiatives like these send a clear signal: ideas are valued, and people can chase their dreams without leaving the company. The question is how to make the most of programs like these to ultimately drive the birth of new ideas that can flourish into lasting innovation.

We designed a program that provides a systematic approach for exploring and validating early ideas – ultimately enabling rapid progression from an idea to a business concept. With the guidance of experienced coaches, teams moved iteratively through the different phases of the program to explore value and business potential, as well as the possible impact of their idea. 

The teams tested new tools and working methods to evaluate further the best mechanisms for realizing new ideas. An important focus point was identifying and validating assumptions related to the problem, technology, and business model before investing time and money in building a solution.

To ensure the teams addressed genuine problems within their organization, our program encouraged participants to engage potential customers, users, and/or internal stakeholders. The coaches supported teams in preparing for interviews while working in close collaboration to formulate insightful questions that focus on exploring the challenges rather than imposing preconceived solutions. These conversations provided valuable information and served as a great source of inspiration for the teams – sparking fresh perspectives while fostering innovative thinking.

We brought people from various parts of the organization together to form cross-functional teams. Their different backgrounds and perspectives made exploring a given idea from multiple angles possible, significantly widening the arena of opportunity when thinking about a specific problem.

The program was designed as an immersive learning journey for participants to maximize benefits for each team’s ability to soak in new learnings. In weekly sharing sessions, we facilitated the exchange of insights and experiences. This and face-to-face workshops generated valuable moments for feedback loops and knowledge exchange.

• Developing an encouraging environment for innovation
• Strengthening a culture of experimentation with customers and stakeholders
• Helping people enhance skills and ways of working within business and service design
• Fostering cross-functional collaboration
• Driving leadership commitment to innovation efforts
• Building a systematic approach for evaluating and prioritizing ideas