Bring your idea to life!
“Life’s too short to build something nobody wants.” Ash Maurya
Launched in 2020, Kickbox is an innovation platform open to all Roche employees who look for a hands-on solution to move quickly from an initial idea towards experimentation and potentially to it’s full implementation.
Kickbox is an enabler of bottom-up innovation allowing everyone who makes use of it to be the driver of their own idea, access many valuable resources quickly, expand their own network or simply follow proven agile idea development practices and principles. This everyone might be you!
Here are two of the Kickbox principles:
To find out whether your business idea meets a customer need, you need to discuss it with lots of people, both inside and outside your company. Presenting your idea again and again can be tiring, but you’ll learn how to sum up your idea better, get feedback and convince people of its benefits.
There are no successful intrapreneurs who developed their idea from behind their desks, who didn’t back their words up with action or who preferred colorful PowerPoint slides over customer feedback. That’s why the Kickbox encourages you to move on from the theoretical concept and carry out real experiments.
Kickbox is composed of several key elements:
A web platform where each individual in the organization is invited to enter an innovative idea and make it transparent to others
A physical box - a Kickbox - delivered to every kickboxer, that contains all you would need to kick-off and validate an innovative project. The program is playful and the physical Kickbox links up perfectly with the platform
A diverse peer community where coaches, experts and kickboxers exchange and help each other
A set of services you may use while developing your idea (e.g. IT Services like application mockups or robotic process automation)
To sum up. The goal of Kickbox is to enable bottom-up innovation by empowering you (employees, teams and leaders) to be the driver of your idea and equipping you with tools needed at the start to help Roche to grow.
“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” Thomas A. Edison
Kickbox is not only about being innovative. The platform is also an enabler to learn and apply new ways of working. Starting your idea with Kickbox will introduce you to new, agile working methods in a playful way and allow you to apply the learnings to your own project. Your experience will equip you to become an ambassador for failure culture, validated learnings and innovation within the organisation.
A concrete example of an outcome delivered by using elements of Kickbox is “The Factory”
“The difference between a vision and a hallucination is that other people can see the vision.” Marc Andreessen
In November 2020, The Factory launched with a big ambition: leverage the unseen creative talents within Roche to make our organization more agile, more efficient and more skilled at creative productivity.
Since The Factory’s inception, over 80 Talents from 19 different countries have joined and volunteered their hard work and skills to deliver over 300 impactful projects for their peers all over the world. The Factory has thus saved Roche over CHF 850’000* in agency costs globally and its output has been shown the highest possible appreciation by its Roche and Genentech patrons.
But don’t just take their marketing words for it!
Check the Factory's Part 1 Video where their customers themselves share their views!
All the Factorians are humbled by the positive response to their passion. Yet as demand for their services keeps growing rapidly, they call upon anyone with a desire to employ his or her creative abilities to solve other people’s problems to join their pool of talents.
Please reach out to The Factory Founders to learn more about how you can become part of The Factory family.
By the way, The Factory services are also available on the Kickbox platform to you.
Interested to know more about kickbox or join the community and become a kickboxer, a coach or an expert ? Visit Roche Kickbox
Written by:
Pawel Skarul (Pharma Site Basel & Kaiseraugst)
Gabrielle Benjamin (Global Product Strategy)
Jeremy Martin (Pharma International)