Intuition as driving force behind innovation at Effectory

2010 – Effectory is one of the bigger players in the field of management information. The company offers management information on markets, customers and employees to medium and large organizations. Together with The Volkskrant (a Dutch newspaper) Effectory awards an annual prize for Best Employer. The innovation process is focused on intuitive and incremental innovations.

Approach
Innovation within Effectory is characterized by intuition. Great innovative breakthroughs usually come from the intuitive minds in the management team. Moreover, intuition plays a role to observe what is happening in the world around. The latter is actually the core competence of the organization.
The company has re-invented itself in 1996. The turnaround was twofold. The service no longer was focused externally on doing consumer research for the client only, but was supplemented by internally-oriented research (employee satisfaction research). Besides the company changed the name from  Nederlands Centrum voor Bedrijfskundige Projecten (NCBP) (Dutch Centre for Business Administration Projects) into  ‘Effectory’ now.

The innovation process within Effectory seems to run less routinely than the research process for clients is performed by Effectory. However, there is room for incremental innovation, the improvement of existing products. This further development is supported by two divisions: one for concept development and one for process development. In mid-2010, the “internal customer survey’ is put on the market.

Reference
In the book Innovatieroutine (Innovation Routine), 2008 by D. Jacobs and  H. Snijders, twenty companies were investigated for repeated innovation success, including the case of Effectory. The entire case description (in Dutch)  is attached.

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