How ISS accelerates innovation with customer insights

Founded in 2016, the ISS Corporate Garage serves as an autonomous start-up lab focusing on service innovation. Its goal is to explore new business models and services and bring those innovations back to ISS and distribute the benefits to their customers. As the fifth-largest private employer in the world, ISS has many customers that stand to benefit from the work of the Corporate Garage.

One of ISS’s greatest challenges is managing employee turnover. Each week the organisation onboards 4,000 new hires around the world, incurring a huge cost. To make the process of transitioning between jobs more efficient, the Corporate Garage team came up with the concept for WorkID — a digital tool that helps workers store, verify and share documents such as identification, permits, and licenses with their employers.
After developing a core concept, UserTribe and Corporate Garage designed a study to gauge the initial reactions to the WorkID concept. Within a few days, we spoke with 10 blue-collar workers in Mexico who had changed jobs in the last year.

The Corporate Garage team uses the traditional Google Venture Sprint methodology but often customises the process to fit their requirements. Getting feedback on their initial ideas and concepts is hugely important, and with the entire power of ISS behind them, they can often find relevant people to share their ideas with. Through internal crowdsourcing, they are able to get feedback from thousands of colleagues all over the world.
However, even with such an abundant network, the process of collecting that feedback is still time-consuming. The team decided to partner with UserTribe and see how our methodologies could fit into their sprint processes.

The report we delivered included insights on what people thought about the initial concept, including what they found concerning and what they considered most valuable – accelerating the validation process, and helping innovation teams work quickly.