Deloitte Greenhouse: Belgium

The client’s challenge

An international pharmaceutical company, facing an abrupt drop in sales due to the approaching patent expiration of one of its key products, approached Deloitte Belgium to help it explore potential new revenue streams and business models. Rising research, development, and clinical trial costs are quickly making the traditional process of bringing products to market less viable. Even with a strong product pipeline, the client understands that “business as usual” is not an option; it needs to leave its comfort zone and explore new solutions, markets, and business relationships that will sustain the company for the long term.

Deloitte’s solution

After working with client leadership to define its key strategic challenges and goals, Deloitte assisted the client in sourcing and selecting several outside-the-box product and service ideas from the client’s employees. As incentive to boost participation, employees were offered the chance to attend the upcoming Greenhouse session if their ideas stood out. As with any Greenhouse session, this upfront planning and extensive engagement of the client team was critical to the success of the session.

With promising concepts chosen, client leaders and employees attended a multiple-day Fast Track session at the Deloitte Belgium Greenhouse. Fast Track is a Deloitte methodology that’s employed to help accelerate the development of business cases from initial ideas. The Greenhouse’s creative environment complemented the objectives of this exercise. Each idea was thoroughly vetted during the program, with participants discussing market and client insights, value creation, business models, and the organizations needed to support their
approaches. Halfway through the program, teams pitched each idea to a “jury” of client leaders and external professionals who selected the most outstanding ideas. At the end of the program, Deloitte facilitators helped participants to evolve those ideas into tangible business cases and go-to-market plans.

Visual harvesting, a graphic scribing approach often used in Greenhouses, was a valuable tool for helping participants capture content and spark discussions throughout the Fast Track session. The graphics not only created a different dynamic than simple word summaries, but they also provided takeaways client leaders could use upon returning to their offices.

Impact on client’s business

After a couple of very intensive workshops, a collection of employee-submitted ideas were culled, developed, and refined to yield actionable plans, charting a course for potentially innovative breakthroughs. The client appreciated the Greenhouse’s imaginative environment, which allowed them to focus on the process and conduct “illuminating discussions” that would have been difficult to duplicate in a typical office workspace. Client leaders lauded the “great methodology to improve knowledge sharing and creativity.” And the client’s employees’ ability to work directly with their leaders in an immersive environment fostered a “unifying experience” that generated value for all participants.