ORGANISATION

Alcad S.L. was founded in 1988 and designs, manufactures and markets telecommunications products and solutions (television signals, access control, building management).

CHALLENGE
To work towards developing an innovation culture within the company.

IMPROBABLE COLLABORATOR

Mikel Morlas. With a multidisciplinary academic background and experience in various groups in the field of artistic practices, he combines the development of innovative educational projects and training in public and private organisations with his activity as an artist and curator.

MIKEL MORLAS' PROPOSAL
His idea is to create a device that, based on Alcad’s video broadcasting and reception technologies (either by applying them physically or metaphorically), mirrors the smallest units of information and cultural replication (memes) related to innovation that are circulating within the organisation (either imported or internally generated through formal and informal channels), thereby reinforcing their 360º dissemination.

PROJECT NExT
The process, initiated by R&D management and accelerated by a driving force group of workers from different departments within the company, has led to staging various participatory and co-creation actions aimed at identifying ideas to define a strategy for cultural change, including the details of the design of specific actions to implement in the short, medium and long term.

The work began by suggesting to a group of six workers to culturally analyse Alcad in relation to innovation through the creation of some memes (images that contain replicable ideas). The results were very significant and helped to understand organisational context.

It was then decided to open up the process to other workers, firstly by holding a competition for ideas to provide the project with a name, innovating in the way of communicating this. Twenty-eight people participated in the contest by proposing names and 47 people voted for their favourite. The winning name was “NExT” (Nueva Experiencia de Trabajo, or New Work Experience).

Once a name had been given to the project, some specific actions were designed to help share valuable information aimed at defining the cultural change strategy. An important design criterion at this point in time was that these actions would in turn imply initial contact and experimentation with new ways of doing things at Alcad, which could then be used by its workers in the future, promoting empowerment in order to generate proposals and the development of skills related to innovation.

Three co-creation sessions were programmed in which 37 people voluntarily participated. The aim of the first session was to provide several examples of dynamics to encourage creativity. These examples were used to design the next two sessions by the driving force group and the people in the group consequently were able to learn from this.

All the documentation generated in these sessions was displayed for several days in a room at the workplace so that all the workers could see the work that had been done, triggering feedback and encouraging participation in the next few steps.

The complexity of the analysis of all the information that was collected suggested the need to identify a main crosscutting concept upon which to guide the strategy of the NExT project. The concept chosen was “Talent”, as it was thought that going deeper into improving its recruitment, development and retention in Alcad would be essential and help to improve the other aspects identified as stimulators for an innovative culture.

The design of these specific actions was addressed in a second round of co-creation sessions and this led to the creation of working groups that provided greater detail in defining their initial proposals.

RESULTS

The documents produced will serve as a guide to implement and develop the actions and become part of a “NExT Roadmap” document.

Alcad has decided to participate in the IrunLab Industria 2016 programme to work on implementing the results it obtained in IrunLab Industria 2015. It will once again collaborate with Mikel Morlas.