Building a Fit-for-Future Innovation Organisation for a Global Polymer Specialist

As a result of organic growth through historic mergers and acquisitions, the innovation organisation had a dispersed geographic footprint with presence in over 10 locations and countries, presenting challenges in both complexity and duplication of effort. The fragmented structure had led to extensive layers, overlapping roles and unclear accountabilities, which in turn had resulted in slow decision-making, inconsistent governance and sub-optimal cross-functional collaboration. However, the company’s strategic ambition, coupled with the understanding that innovation was a critical enabler to this, made it clear a more agile and globally coherent innovation engine was required. Therefore, our client was in need of a new organisation set-up that could:

• Serve as a holistic innovation ecosystem with harmonised ways of working, clear accountabilities, and distinguished roles & responsibilities.
• Enable an ambitious innovation pipeline that supports both current business needs and future innovation ambitions, encouraging exploration and expansive thinking.
• Transform company culture and mindset so innovation is recognised as a partner to the business, with teams feeling empowered and energised to collaborate.

In close partnership and collaboration with our client’s leaders from the Innovation, Technical, HR and Commercial communities, Skarbek deployed a comprehensive organisation redesign process, involving:

• Scope & Vision Alignment: Defined the focus, ambition and success criteria for the future set-up, as well as core design principles to guide all subsequent decisions, ensuring a balance of efficiency, capability, and future growth needs.
• Current Organisation “Health Check”:Conducted a holistic assessment of the existing innovation organisation and partnering teams, analysing current structures, accountabilities and work flows to identify core pain points and areas of misalignment.
• Archetype Exploration: Evaluated industry-relevant organisation archetypes to understand common structures and best in class practice, to better inform future design choices.
• “Jobs To Be Done” Mapping: Mapped the critical jobs that teams within the future innovation organisation must perform throughout the end-to-end innovation process from ideation to post-launch, “running water through the pipes” to simulate real workflows and highlight the critical capabilities absent in the current structure.
• Headcount & Cost Optimisation Analysis: Undertook a detailed review of existing roles and workloads to identify opportunities for increased efficiency, enabling a targeted headcount reduction that preserved key existing capabilities while freeing up resources for reinvestment into new capabilities and roles.
• Final Organisation Design: Developed a future-ready structure through greater centralisation and corporate scale whilst maintaining customer proximity, with clear accountabilities, structured governance and strengthened capability for delivering high quality innovation.
• Stakeholder Alignment: Engaged leadership and senior business stakeholders to embed cross-functional input, secure buy in and ensure readiness for implementation.

Through disciplined analysis, close collaboration and clear design principles, Skarbek helped the client reshape their innovation organisation into one that is simpler, stronger and more strategically aligned.

The project delivered both significant cost savings and reinvestment opportunities in capabilities that will drive long-term growth, ensuring the business is equipped to innovate with speed, focus and impact.