Challenge
Bringing new value to city dwellers, by designing innovative solutions for online grocery shopping
With over 200 pickup points across Belgium and home delivery services, Collect&Go is the Belgian market leader for online grocery shopping. As part of Colruyt Group, the brand has an established place on the market but was seeking a better foothold in cities, while also anticipating constantly changing customer expectations by experimenting with new ideas.
Even though Collect&Go has a widespread presence across the country, its market penetration in the bigger cities was significantly lower.
The company wanted to find a business approach that would persuade city dwellers to use the service, and called in Board of Innovation to do just that.
Sound familiar? We can help.
Approach
Accelerator program to launch
new business concepts
Board of Innovation rolled out an accelerator program to develop and test new business ideas.
The challenge was tackled with a multi-phased approach, using a combination of design thinking, business model innovation, and the lean/start-up methodology.
From the get-go, the approach was customer-centric; there was extensive input from end customers themselves, who were involved in every step of the project – from problem fit and ideation to validation, and trying the first MVP of the solution. The project team could rely on the feedback and expectations of the customers to improve the design of the solution and do several iterations.
The program aimed to swiftly develop and test new business ideas, with limited resources. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, it was put on hold several times, but that didn’t curb the ambition of the project.
Due to the complexity of the validation phase, we built an ad-hoc experimentation dashboard to keep track of the nine different experiments carried out on various channels – digital and physical.
I was really impressed by the speed at which we worked. We had exploration, ideation, experimentation and test phases and we always involved our customers
outcome
A fresh new concept for
fresh groceries in the city
The program resulted in City Collect, a brand-new concept.
The idea was rapidly tested on the streets of Brussels, offering residents in the area a multi-channel experience starting online with a specially designed app, and ending out on the streets of the city.
The collection points were designed as mobile electric cargo bikes moving around the city, delivering grocery orders to the urban communities of Brussels.
It is a nice gift, as a designer, to know exactly what is the ideal solution for my customers
Impact
New business concept
& capability building
The innovation accelerator program had a twofold impact on Collect&Go;
- New Business Concept: a new business concept was designed and validated in a swift manner, bringing value to city dwellers who prefer more frequent and smaller grocery shopping experiences.
- Capability Building: the innovation accelerator enabled Collect&Go to work in an even more customer-centric way, involving their target audience in the concept design. Moreover, it nudged the design team to disrupt their regular approach and build and test their first ever minimum viable product – live in the market.
Meanwhile, Collect&Go created their Innovation Lab, leveraging the knowledge and expertise gained during the Board of Innovation-led acceleration track.
As you are reading this, the Collect&Go Innovation Lab is working on new exciting challenges across the different Colruyt Group brands #learningbydoing.
Check out the video below to see how the new business concept worked!
Our people on this project
