SuperPharm, a subsidiary of Agostini’s Group, is the leading retail pharmacy chain in the Caribbean country of Trinidad. SuperPharm provides customers with walk-in and drive-thru window pharmaceutical services and caters to consumer health, wellness, and personal care needs with their products and services.
Agostini's Limited was seeking a way to foster innovation across its geographically dispersed subsidiaries. The company had never done a formal bottom-up innovation program before. They were seeking a partner who could provide both an easy-to-use platform for employees to submit, collaborate around, and surface great ideas along with someone who could provide guidance and best practices around processes for implementing bottom-up innovation.
The Agostini’s Innovation Lab launched a time-based challenge targeting employees at SuperPharm aimed at collecting small ideas with powerful impact. Employees were able to collaborate with colleagues using tagging, real-time chat, and crowd voting features which helped to surface the best ideas.
Administrators and decision-makers evaluated ideas on custom criteria using scorecards, refinement stages, and the platforms notifications feature to provide a feedback loop to idea submitters on the state of their ideas. Users earned points for participation in the challenge and decision-makers awarded prizes to top-performing participants.
Key highlights of what made this challenge successful include Superpharm's robust communication plan prior to launch, ongoing assessment of idea contributions during the challenge, and designing an action plan to increase engagement as the challenge end date approached.
This was done by creating a strategic plan to empower middle managers to push and incentivize employees by offering free coffee using Ideawake's communication, gamification, and prize-awarding features. The combination of utilizing Ideawake and a strong communication plan led to a contribution of 131 ideas, 736 comments, and over 2,500 votes from 328 SuperPharm team members.
