How it started

In a category with more choice than ever, Anheuser-Busch needed to find new ways to respond to changing consumer needs and accelerate growth. The company set out to reinvent its innovation process, moving towards a more consumer-centred approach that could deliver relevant ideas faster.

To support this ambition, Anheuser-Busch North America partnered with us for its annual Innovation Week (iWeek), bringing together more than 200 cross-functional participants to fuel the innovation pipeline with consumer-inspired beverage concepts.

The goal was clear: reduce traditional development timelines of 18–24 months to 100 days or less, while increasing the volume of successful innovations.

How we inspired change

Innovation Week (iWeek) was designed to take teams outside their usual ways of working and spark ideas through inspiration, consumer understanding and collaboration. For every edition, we set the bar higher to define areas to ideate from. Starting from previous trend and research reports, we introduced creative crowdsourcing in 2019.

By truly embracing the power of outside-in thinking in 2020, we engaged with consumers via seven online research communities, each set up to engage with 50 consumers around different opportunity spaces. This generated a rich set of consumer insights to spark new ideas via immersion and ideation workshops at the start of the iWeek. We included consumer-fueled iterations, in two waves of overnight consumer screening, testing and optimizing of +200 new product ideas.

The result was a compilation of consumer feedback, including a quantitative ranking and qualitative suggestions for improvement, via video feedback (VoxPopMe), obtained in just one night. To bring the ideas to life, a team of sketchers and designers helped visualize them.

In 2020, Anheuser-Busch took things even further, focusing not only on idea desirability, but also on feasibility and viability to produce. Before the iWeek, 200 disruptive ideas were crafted and tested in 40+ hours of ideation and six overnight screeners. This allowed for even more AB teams to contribute during the iWeek, from Finance to Supply Chain, delivering ideas that are not only desirable for consumers but will also be successful in the market.

How it lives on

The reinvented innovation approach significantly accelerated Anheuser-Busch’s product development process, reducing the journey from insight to shelf from two years to less than 100 days.

The company increased its share of industry innovation volume from 10% in 2017 to 50% in 2018 and 2019. In 2018 alone, more than 40 regional and national products were launched, while six of the top 15 share gainers in the industry in 2019 belonged to Anheuser-Busch. Overall, the brand continued to grow topline revenue in the U.S.

Following the success of the programme in North America, the approach was also adopted in other markets, including China and Canada.