LION

Exponentially worked with Lion - one of the region’s most innovative food and beverage companies - as part of an accelerator facilitated by Slingshot, which sought to match corporates with relevant start-ups in order to build innovative and market-changing technologies. Exponentially ran pretotyping and rapid experimentation workshops in order to transform these companies’ approach to innovation, taking the emphasis away from building ideas and instead focussing on testing and validating ideas before investing in them.

Left: Workshop participants discussing ideas and experiments | Right: Exponentially’s Leslie Barry with Ben Hutt.

For Lion, the accelerator was an experiment in embracing experimentation. “We didn’t set clear goals or objectives beyond testing and learning,” says Edward Massey, Lion’s Group Strategy Manager. Exponentially’s rapid experimentation workshops helped to embed a philosophy of testing and learning into the team’s innovation process. By testing and iterating ideas, the company could make informed decisions about where to invest, and continue to use the structured, repeatable process of pretotyping to embed innovation within the organisation. “To be successful in this space, you need to embed a culture of innovation that is sustainable, repeatable and ground up,” says Edward. “The best ideas often come from the depths of the organisation or externally – leadership in innovation is providing the catalyst for ideas, not the ideas themselves.” Pretotyping and rapid experimentation shifts the focus away from the ideas themselves, and instead emphasises the importance of testing and iterating on initial ideas to gather reliable data and ensure that only the best ideas are moving forward.