Unilever Infuses Innovation at All Business Levels For Continuous Improvement

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300+

startups identified and progressed through the platform

70 ideas submitted

and assigned ownership in the innovation team in first year of deployment

33%

of startups are in active collaboration with the group

125

users in first year of deployemnt

Company

Unilever

Industry

Consumer Goods

Description

Unilever Group is a multinational consumer goods company that produces a wide range of products, from food and beverages to personal care items and cleaning products. With a history dating back to the 1800s, Unilever is one of the largest companies in the world and operates in over 190 countries.

Our commitment to continuous improvement and innovation is bolstered by Bloomflow. It provides an integrated approach to managing our diverse innovation portfolio, fostering collaboration between start-ups, academia, incubators, and VCs. With it, we are able to streamline our ideation process, harness data-driven insights, and promote open communication, ultimately contributing to a more effective and informed innovation strategy.

Sam Dover / Global AI Strategy Lead at Unilever

The Challenge

There was no single, centralized platform to create, manage and extract value from their evolving portfolio of startups and partners
They had no way to manage the massive inflow of requests to work with them from innovation partners
There was no tool to create, analyze and find solutions to their problem statements and internal needs

The Solution

Unilever chose Bloomflow for their aligned values and to use as a one-stop-shop platform for innovation. Notably:
Gathering ideas from across the group
Providing a common entry point to outside partners
Managing a dynamic partner database
Ability to match up ideas with a portfolio of solutions
Tracking their innovation funnel
They implemented a detailed tagging structure to align innovation partners and programs to their global technology architecture, meaning internal communication is much easier
After the first year of deployment, the platform is being adopted by other innovation teams throughout the business, driving high visibility and macro-trend analysis

The Results