Captured Digital Growth Opportunities Through a Remote Intrapreneurship Programme for Aptar

We helped AptarGroup launch an intrapreneurship programme consisting of a roadmap of innovative digital initiatives while also building intrapreneurial capabilities to capture digital growth opportunities from global market shifts.

Background

Aptar is a global leader in the design and manufacturing of a broad range of drug delivery, consumer product dispensing and active material science solutions. They serve a variety of end markets including pharmaceutical, beauty, personal care, home, food and beverage.

Aptar’s manufacturing facilities are located in North America, Europe, Asia and South America with more than 13,000 dedicated employees in 20 countries. They are trading on the New York Stock Exchange with the symbol ATR.

Brief

In recent years, Aptar has faced significant changes to its industry, including shifts in consumer market value chains and regulatory pressure around sustainability. They appreciate, nevertheless, that the domain of “digital” enables entire industries to work together, with new forms of interaction, optimisation and collaborative innovation.

Aptar took a proactive approach to transform by asking Studio Zao to design and implement remote intrapreneurship programmes across their geographies and regions, starting with Latin America, to reshape their business in the context of digital opportunities and empower internal talent.

IMPACT

Starting with a regional focus, Studio Zao designed and delivered an intrapreneurship programme to achieve two key goals:

1. Build a Digital Innovation Pipeline — Add a number of new solutions to the region’s digital innovation portfolio.

2. Foster an Intrapreneurial Capability — Generate an internal sustainable innovation capability grounded on entrepreneurial mindsets and tools

The programme spanned 4 months and covered the full innovation cycle, from Strategic Alignment and Innovation Briefs to Pitching & Evaluation.

• Strategic Alignment

  Interviews with senior stakeholders covering customer needs, market opportunities and business challenges in the regional context. A review of this followed by an alignment on digital innovation priorities and opportunities was conducted in a remote session. This process enabled three distinct innovation teams to surface from the cohort, providing the right skill set and perspective needed to tackle each opportunity.

• Innovation Brief Refinement

  Creation of clear Innovation Briefs, to direct each innovation team to an opportunity area.

• Customer Discovery

  Teams were guided to conduct Customer Discovery interviews with Aptar’s clients focused on understanding and validating the underlying customer needs.

• Ideation

  Generation of ideas that address Innovation Briefs via a rapid “sprint”-style remote workshop involving cross-functional teams.

• Prototyping

  Co-creation of proposition prototype mock-ups, to help communicate the product and customer narrative through exciting visuals.

• Business Case

  Formulation of a roadmap and lean business case for testing the propositions in-market via digital experiments with clear responsibilities assigned.

• Pitching

  A culmination of the programme through an exciting ‘pitch’ event, with 3 teams presenting their propositions and articulating strategic value to senior stakeholders.

Outcomes

We helped Aptar launch its innovation pipeline with digital propositions which present strong short and long term value, led by cross-functional innovators within the organisation.

The intrapreneurship programme has paved the way for a repeatable process which over time will embed intrapreneurial culture within Aptar and yield concepts to feed the region’s innovation pipeline.