Innovation management at Swiss Post. Case Study

Abstract

This thesis documents the business implementation of the top-down and bottom-up approaches to drive innovation at Swiss Post, compared against the latest theories.

Swiss Post distinguishes between bottom-up and top-down innovation. Top-down innovation is an initiative or campaign as a question or request towards a group of experts. This group can be all employees or a selected committee of internal or external individuals. By the example of the case at Swiss Post, tools, methodologies and strategic implementation are explained. Bottom-up approaches are initiated by internal personnel or departments. This is for the continuous improvement process as well as for the radical innovation process. A web based tool called PostIdea is used to describe and gather ideas. Ideas, if incremental, reach an expert of a particular field to take care, if radical, they are passed to an innovation manager. Top-down and bottom-up innovation are let through a stage-gate process. Once accepted into the process, CHF 50’000 are available to initialy develop a business idea. Through a stage-gate processes, juries judge the ideas upon expertise. Innovation management is situated within corporate human resources but reports directly to the CEO. It has a budget available of 1.5‰ of the corporations annual turnover. Innovation management at Swiss Post provides tools and methodology to drive innovation but doesn’t act as a R&D department but can start initiatives.