How Neopost innovates with Lean Startup

For several years, mail volumes have been falling. Despite this decline, one of the main equipment makers in the sector, Neopost (1.1 billion in revenue in 2014), keeps growing. The company has managed to complement its mail offers with offers around digital communication and parcel shipping. To create new offers, Neopost runs, among other things, an Innovation Challenge that encourages employees to present new service ideas. This year, the participants were supported by Lean Startup experts.

The 12 projects, coached by the Lean Startup experts, first broke their ideas down into hypotheses, then used ultra-short iterations to try to verify each of these hypotheses.

They interviewed customers to understand their real needs, tested and de-risked their value proposition and built their MVP. This feedback let them draw concrete lessons to evolve their idea.

One of the projects aimed to modify a tape dispenser so it could simply put a handle on a parcel. A typical case of an invention looking for its audience. Having realised how important it is to understand the customer's need, the project owner checked in the field whether his idea was of real interest to retailers. It was by interviewing wine merchants that he realised their need to make it easier for their customers to carry cases.

After this coaching, the teams presented their results to the Executive Committee, then to all staff. Compared with previous years, the difference was striking, in particular:

• more mature, more complete and more coherent projects
• stronger business cases, thanks to thorough validation of the hypotheses.

These improvements led to greater commitment from management, which had a direct impact on the implementation of some projects. Among them, a "digital health record" that makes it easier to plan interventions and updates on machines in the field. This tool relies on a big data infrastructure recently set up at Neopost. The famous handle dispenser, for its part, is in the industrialisation phase. It was presented at the 2015 Concours Lépine, where it won a silver medal.

Laurent Farlotti, Director of Innovation and Patents, observed: “The projects are more mature, with more business elements. The participants were highly motivated and management reacted very well. Without Lean Startup, these projects would have stayed at the idea stage and would probably never have gone any further.”

Lean Startup was introduced at Neopost in 2013 by Philippe Boulanger, the group's CTO. 80 employees have been trained in the method to date.