Luminus - The Argonauts - Innovation 'at your service'

#NEXT2019

2019

Brussels - Hasselt - Liège - Ghent

Energy

Business design

Innovation Challenge #NEXT2019

Luminus is the 2nd player in Belgium in terms of energy and is always looking for new ideas to better meet the specific needs of its customers. In addition, Luminus also wants to play an active role in tackling the climate challenge and handling energy more efficiently. Luminus wants to become the preferred energy partner by helping its customers reduce their carbon footprint with innovative energy-efficient solutions and renewable energy.

Frederik Simoen

Innovation manager Luminus

"Gathering more than 100 innovative ideas and turning these into 6 top business concepts, of which 3 were implemented! The Argonauts did it!"

Challenge

Luminus is strongly committed to involving all employees in innovation through the #NEXT program. A number of societal and technological challenges were launched for this in 2019. The assignment was to inspire the entire Luminus staff about these challenges and to have ideas put forward. These ideas should ultimately result in new services and / or start-ups that will be incubated inside or outside of Luminus.

Frederik Simoen

Innovation manager Luminus

"Gathering more than 100 innovative ideas and turning these into 6 top business concepts, of which 3 were implemented! The Argonauts did it!"

Joost Thurman

Co-founder The Argonauts

"It adorns a company like Luminus in this way to involve ALL employees in its strategy and thus create a company-wide culture of innovation and entrepreneurship!"

Approach & results

During 5 months we have immersed the 800 employees of Luminus in a broadly supported innovation challenge around the challenges. We worked in 6 steps: tease, activate, define, ideate, sprint and pitch based on keynotes, inspiration sessions, co-creation sessions, design sprints and pitches at the various Luminus locations. We have “packed” the challenge into a competition formula that made everyone in the organization feel encouraged to participate.

First we inspired all Luminus employees around the social and technological key challenges. Many ideas were submitted from this, which we developed into concrete business cases and pitches via co-creation and a design sprint. With the Luminus intrapreneurs we went through all steps of the Design Thinking process: empathize with your client, define your challenges well, generate ideas, develop value propositions, create a business model, validate, prototype and pitch. It was a fantastic experience to be able to get started with design thinking with so many ideas and teams!

Result

During the apotheosis in December, several service concepts were pitched, half of which were selected to be incubated inside or outside Luminus in 2020 as a startup or internal development project, thanks to a successful collaboration with the Luminus innovation team, Curious Cats, the experts from VITO, VUB and Startit@KBC!

Joost Thurman

Co-founder The Argonauts

"It adorns a company like Luminus in this way to involve ALL employees in its strategy and thus create a company-wide culture of innovation and entrepreneurship!"