Helping Walgreens 10x their innovation results

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Client background 

Walgreens Boots Alliance is an integrated healthcare, pharmacy and retail leader which operates globally. With a 170-year history of caring for communities, this client has a strong reputation among customers, and serving millions of them every day.

However, many heritage businesses experience similar corporate innovation challenges in the face of continual technological innovation. In today’s digital-focused world, customer loyalty is waning, competition is higher than ever before, and consumers are increasingly tech-savvy.

Walgreens Boots Alliance’s challenges

Walgreens Boots Alliance were looking for a partner who could help develop propositions quickly and efficiently. Their business development team approached Future Foundry to help collate compelling, customer-centric evidence to help fuel the development of a new generation of experiences, products and services for their customers. This meant taking a new approach to business innovation.

Their solution lay in the first two horizons of our Velocity™ Innovation Operating System:

Opportunity Identification

Designed to help businesses develop compelling, evidenced and prioritised pipelines of new opportunities, we implemented our Opportunity Identification programme as the first step of our work with Walgreens Boots Alliance. During this process, we generated ideas for new propositions aligned with their customers' needs and desires, and plotted them into an innovation pipeline. By the end of the month, we had developed a prioritised roadmap based on key feasibility criteria.

Proposition Incubation

Next, Walgreens Boots Alliance began a 3 month programme designed to create desirable, feasible, viable new ideas while decreasing risk and increasing certainty by completing in-depth competitor analysis, solution development, proposition testing and more, across six sprints.

At the end of the 12 weeks, Walgreens Boots Alliance had built a strong case based on customer engagement metrics and forecasted commercial returns. This was achieved by thoroughly evaluating venture popularity, favoured pricing tiers and product specificities. 

The end result was the development of multiple MVP testing stimuli with which customers could engage, helping reveal which options were the most desirable and viable opportunities for Walgreens Boots Alliance to pursue.

10x innovation results

In just four short months, Walgreens Boots Alliance revitalised its corporate innovation strategy and took a new approach to disruptive innovation. 

Walgreens Boots Alliance found value in the clear set of directions provided by our Velocity™ Innovation Operating System; it provided clear outcomes for each week and helped Walgreen Boots Alliance’s business development team communicate opportunities to stakeholders, adding credibility to their mission.

"The Velocity system has taught me the importance of considering the three crucial aspects: desirability, feasibility, and viability. You know, it's all about constantly revisiting whether a product or service is desirable to the consumer, feasible to develop, and how viable it is as a business opportunity. This practice has given me some valuable discipline, something that I'll definitely carry forward. Those three words—desirability, feasibility, and viability—they're going to stick with me forever" - Marni Allen, Senior Director Consumer Healthcare Futures

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