RETAIL ASSORTMENT INNOVATION
Is your product assortment or your service portfolio future proof? And what about your business model?
The Merchandise Academy is a training and consulting company that helps your company on developing and accelerating the motor of your business: your product assortment and service development and innovation. We will help your company to grow its business by sharpening up your teams innovative and collaborative skills, creating value for both your customers and your organization. With our own Merchandise Academy’s product assortment and service innovation process, which serves as a corporate learning program, we help your company to establish the right tools for product and services development and create a performance culture of constant innovation, ensuring a continuous flow of new high value ‘wow’ products and services, with a shorter time to market, that deliver an exciting and satisfying experience to your customers.
The Merchandise Academy is an inhouse workshop process meant for retailers of all sizes and for vendors of consumer products. Also startup companies the Merchandise Academy can assist in their product and service development process. We offer a basic one day fast track workshop version with direct results for startups and small size companies and a program of training modules of several weeks for medium size companies.
For big size companies the Merchandise Academy works together with an expert company in the field of digital learning technology to deliver a state-of-the-art blended learning platform solution for your team which empowers your employees to learn, share and collaborate regarding product and service development.
PROCESS
The Merchandise Academy’s product assortment and service innovation process is a learning environment where innovation, excitement and collaboration meet, in a fun and entrepreneurial mindset, bringing together all your key employees who deliver value to your customers. The Merchandise Academy connects working with learning. We strongly believe in 70:20:10 learning reference model.
The teams involved in the innovation process work on your product and services innovation funnel and at the same time learn about product innovation techniques, consumer needs and how to improve the collaboration with their colleagues.
We improve your teams performance regarding collaboration and innovation. The Merchandise Academy works with a structured process and an innovation tool that will increase the product development productivity of your team and create a robust continuously filled pipeline of consumer products and services. We balance creativity and execution. The content of each Merchandise Academy’s innovation process will be tailored to the category or categories our clients are dealing with. The trainings will be in-house and online for the blended solution, so in the context of the daily working environment of each and every employee.
The Merchandise Academy innovation process is divided into 3 stages:
Pre-check
At first we will closely examine your current product assortment process and your culture of innovation by interviews and an analysis of your product assortment and your customers. We will check what is working and what is not working. We will identify barriers in the process of product development.
Program
After this evaluation process we will start with our program of learning modules, preparing for the physical innovation workshop. The learning modules offer the latest insights on product development, positioning, innovation, trends, design thinking, neuromarketing and teambuilding. In the product assortment and service innovation physical workshop we directly work out in detail new products, based on successful proven products, which your company can develop right away and enabling your company to scale up your business.
Follow-up
In the final stage of the process a follow-up track will be available to deliver performance support and for monitoring the progress, for example how many new products will when be available for your customers, how has the collaboration between departments improved and how much has the time to market been shortened.
TEAM
How do you inspire your employees to become even more motivated and perform even better in times of complexity and overexposure to many things? How do you align your different departments and teams?
How do you align your different workforce generations? How do you align your learning & development program with your business strategy? The Merchandise Academy’s innovation process organizes, facilitates and empowers a product assortment development and innovation team, consisting of employees from all customer-involved departments, engaging and aligning all stakeholders for the fast-track product assortment and services innovation process.
The physical workshop acts like a “Hot Spot’”, an environment where innovation, excitement and collaboration meet. The Merchandise Academy speeds up the development of your employee’s innovative and collaborative performance skills. It allows your employees to spend their valuable time on where your company makes the money, the selling of products and/or services. Our process will create acceptance and leverage of different point of views, reduce possible existing frictions breaking down eventual departmental silos.
It will give your company a solid future proof product assortment and services development tool that stands its test should key employees leave and helps new employees in their onboarding process, avoiding essential knowledge and skills loss for your company.
CULTURE
Do you consider your company as a production factory or an innovation lab? Do you have a hierarchic structure or do you operate with small self-steering teams? In addition to your company’s innovation process check the Merchandise Academy as a first check will also review the current innovation culture in your company.
What internal and what external network of knowledge is already available to your company? Is every employee’s knowledge fully leveraged? Especially the knowhow of the more experienced senior employees? What if a key employee leaves your company? Does knowledge get lost? How open and organized is the communication inside your company? How well connected is your workforce? With this information we work together with your team in the context of the Merchandise Academy’s innovation process to develop and shape your learning culture of innovation in a structured forward-thinking way, aligning it with your business strategy.
The pleasant and inspiring productive no-fear culture will empower and engage your employees for the in today’s marketplace necessary continuous innovation that your customers’ are also expecting from you.
