New playground for innovation

KK Wind Solutions’ Edison programme is a platform intended to accelerate testing of new ideas by making organised test sprints to validate if the idea should get materialised as a product or a service.

“We want to become innovation leaders and to meet this ambition, we are going to create an innovation environment and culture inside KKWS. And we want to be known for it,” says Lasse Skov, Concept Development Manager at KK Wind Solutions.

The purpose of creating this environment is to motivate ‘intrapreneurs’. Intrapreneurs means people inside a large company, who uses entrepreneurial skills without incurring the risks associated with the activities by entrepreneurs.

Lasse Skov says: “It is all about accelerating idea generation, testing and the time to market. I like to quote the founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, who once said: "If You're Not Embarrassed By The First Version Of Your Product, You’ve Launched Too Late". By doing this and keep early launch in mind we can test it up against involved customers really fast before we plan something bigger".

Image: Lasse Skov (left) and Jonas Hellmann Petterson (right), are discussing the concept of x-lab. 

It will be possible for employees to go to the x-lab to test ideas but it can also be used as the creative settings if an employee needs to build new work methods and procedures. Employees are even free to come by in their spare time to play with some of the most recent technology gadgets, 3D printing facilities etc.

“We are planning to invite our customers in at an early stage to discuss our ideas on product development and improvements. Actually, we hope that our customers and maybe university students will book our facilities to test their own ideas”, says Lasse Skov.

According to plan, X-Lab will be established in-house at KK Wind Solutions in Ikast, DK during the first half of 2017 – and is expected to be fully up and running by Q3.