Cheese opens the market: Hochland relies on Design Thinking for the future

To remain strong and fit for the future, the Hochland company set itself the following Design Thinking challenge: “Establish Design Thinking in your company and ensure innovative solutions in the long term!”

The learning curve at Hochland is too flat.

The German company Hochland SE is one of the largest private cheese manufacturers in Europe and is represented by subsidiaries on several continents.

“We have well-established and functioning processes in our traditional company. Nevertheless, the learning curve for projects was sometimes too flat,” notes Elena Zloteanu, a long-standing employee who is now Design Thinking program manager at Hochland. ”When developing new products, for example, we didn't always manage to get our customers on board, and we also had product flops.” This was not only frustrating for the highly motivated product managers, it was also not very efficient and therefore expensive.”

The company wanted to establish agile working not only in product development, but for all innovation projects. When Hochland tested our innovation method, the strong user focus was particularly well received. In the meantime, Hochland has systematically implemented HPI Design Thinking in the company.

Trained Design Thinking ambassadors carry the change throughout the entire company.

Hochland decided to introduce Design Thinking into the company through a decentralized network of ambassadors. To do this, we at the HPI d-school trained ten Hochland employees in Design Thinking. These employees came from different departments and locations in various countries.

Employees who were open to new and playful approaches were selected as future ambassadors for Design Thinking. The Design Thinking training reinforced this trait and methodically underpinned it.

The employees from Germany, Russia, Romania and Poland took on their new role as Design Thinkers in addition to their existing roles. They continued to be professionally involved in the company. This enabled the ambassadors to become active in a wide range of areas and in their work contexts – with small impulses or more extensive interventions.

To establish Design Thinking in the company, it was important to make the process and results visible: “With the Design Thinking projects, we were therefore on the road a lot instead of ‘hiding’ in meeting rooms.

Colleagues see us in a brainstorming session or building prototypes in the kitchen – and that's how you start a conversation or get your first tester. The inhibition threshold drops, and curiosity is aroused.”

Initial successful practical examples finally helped to anchor Design Thinking in the company: “If a project team has been working on a topic for quite some time but has reached an impasse, we are sometimes called in. Then a small intervention is often enough to help them break the deadlock and create space for creativity,” Zloteanu reports. ”And once the Design Thinkers have proven themselves as troubleshooters, their colleagues recognize the value of the approach and approach the ambassadors the next time a new project is set up.”

The number of interventions by internal design thinkers at Hochland has steadily increased. Elena Zloteanu alone has given over 60 internal Design Thinking workshops in the last five years. In addition, numerous workshops were organized by the ambassadors in various countries.