case study
Tyson Foods:
Building a Culture of Disruptive Innovation
Tyson Foods, the largest domestic food company in the US and a growing global entity, was facing critical competition and needed to evolve their business beyond their traditional core offerings of fresh meat, chicken and nuggets. To do so, they assembled an interdisciplinary group from across the company with the goal of getting differentiated products to market faster. The challenge is that they weren’t sure how to go about actually doing that.
We worked side-by-side with them through several sprint-based projects in real-time, helping them deliver innovative, user desired products to market at a highly accelerated rate and imbuing the team (and larger organization) with an innovative, human-centered mindset, approach and toolkit.
Tyson Innovation Lab team members share, refine and evaluate concepts during a design sprint.
Approach
We established a modeling engagement, working with the team and demonstrating the full human-centered design approach while enabling each member to execute on the aspects of the work where they were best suited to deliver value. Working this way, the team was able to adopt the mindset, approach and tools while collectively contributing to rich solutions and capitalizing on their respective areas of expertise.
Outcomes
First, the team has been able to launch innovative solutions to market in record time, cutting the lag between concept and rollout from two years to six months. Second, the team has fully adopted the human-centered approach, making it their default way of working, and to such a degree that they are now conducting projects on their own while Lift serves as advisors.
Additionally, they are being sought out by other groups within the organization as thought leaders to shepherd human-centered projects internally, helping to organically evolve the corporate culture. This is creating a more nimble, user-focused organization that takes the needs of people into account at the beginning of every initiative, helping ensure success, both internally or externally.
Final in-market products developed by the Innovation Lab.
Working in-process ideation outputs.
The team leading a remote design sprint, applying the approaches & skills learned through previous work with Lift Collective.