The German Army wanted to increase innovation speed in one of its core capabilities: Logistics. The goal was to harness creative capacity among the troops to foster disruptive bottom-up solution-building.
The German Army's Cyber Innovation Hub (CIH) established an innovation challenge: logistics soldiers could submit ideas for solutions to their most pressing problems and turn them into reality. This challenge planned to increase the speed at which a great innovation idea could be transformed into a solution capable of being used both on and off the assignments and at startup speed.
MVPF was approached to shape the coaching and prototyping process and provide a powerful team of experts. We were to lead 8 individual solution teams over the course of several weeks, from the initial idea to finalized prototype pitch presented to generals and industry leaders.
What we did
As this project took place at the intersection of ideation and validation, a tailor-made ideation and prototyping process was designed specifically for the client. After the initial briefing by the CIH team, we screened all the ideas that were submitted by soldiers and staffed an expert team tailored to each solution.
Over the course of one intense week, 27 soldiers across 8 solution teams were coached on how to turn ideas into features and how to pitch in front of a jury. After an additional 1.5 weeks of rework and development by MVPF, the soldiers presented their solutions on “demo day”, on stage, and in specially created trade show booths.
Our team of strategic designers, venture architects, engineers and product managers created matching hardware and software prototypes that underlined the individual product vision. We provided deep logistics knowledge and built start-up-style pitch decks for the solutions.
Value delivered
86 unique solutions were submitted, and 8 were chosen.
We created hardware and software prototypes for the chosen solutions, including hardware sensor technology, 3D printing, VR environments and app prototyping. We built pitch decks, solution flyers, and trade show booths, and documented the challenge with a professional crew.
After solutions were pitched, 6 were selected for validation, and 3 were chosen to be turned into MVPs and tested. These MVPs will be rolled out in the next year to increase logistics monitoring capabilities, and the speed of large-scale movement of army material, and help protect logistics troops from operational hazards.
The collaboration with MVP Factory, especially in the phase of coaching the soldiers, has contributed decisively to the success of the Innovation Challenge Logistics.
The humans behind this project
