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Novozymes takes advantage of human insights to shorten time to market and increase customer value

Overview

Novozymes is a leading biotech company traditionally focused on developing enzymes for a variety of food and industrial applications. Now the company has embarked on a new journey to determine what its technology can do for human health and develop solutions for tomorrow that are going to drive its business forward.

While Novozymes’ capabilities have always been centered around R&D as their main value driver, there has been an increased focus on developing products faster and targeting consumer needs better.

R&D is a scarce resource so it was imperative to ensure a market need and fit for the potential solutions. By integrating their consumers into each step of the R&D and innovation process, Novozymes has been able to drastically cut their time to market while ensuring that the products it develop procure the greatest possible customer value.

Business Objective

Novozymes has long been a major player in the biotech industry. In the pursuit of future growth opportunities, the company decided to explore innovation and developments in areas outside the more traditional line of business.

Taking the forefront of the biotech industry with human perspectives

Novozymes sought to build the products of tomorrow with the future consumer in mind. However, the company knew that it had to adapt their R&D process to avoid sunk costs in failed products and a long time-to-market. To execute accordingly, a decision was made to reverse its traditional R&D process. The key was to start by figuring out what consumers need and why they need it. That’s where UserTribe comes in. Novozymes, as a result, entered into a strategic partnership with UserTribe to integrate human insights into every step of its innovation process.

”We wanted to go out and capture new markets through innovation and to do that you have to find the right channels of insights to drive your innovation. Bringing UserTribe into our development process has allowed for fast learning loops that in turn impact how we develop new products

Ulrich IrgensGM at OneHealth

A continuous collaboration that’s bound to dominate

UserTribe has primarily been working with Novozymes’ OneHealth centred around how probiotics and enzymes could be utilised for human health applications instead of traditional food and industrial applications. Consequently, this new way of working has now seeped into other business areas such as their Alternative Protein initiative. This initiative is focused on finding uses for a plant-based protein which potentially could outperform the traditionally derived protein sources.

By adapting the way they develop new products and infusing the voice of the consumer in the process from start to finish, Novozymes has managed to decrease their time to market as well as increase the commercial success of new products. These new initiatives from Novozymes demonstrate the benefits of agile product development processes with a customer-first mentality.

Who is Novozymes?

Novozymes is the world leader in biological solutions. Based in Denmark, for more than 70 years they have worked with enzymes and microbes to find biological answers to better lives in a growing world. Novozymes sells enzymes to more than 40 different industries, and their business is rooted in innovation.

14.390

Billion DKK in sales in 2018

6.427

Employees in 2018

48%

market share in industrial enzymes as of 2018

7.000

Granted and pending patents as of 2018

Climate

Save 60 million tons CO2
by enabling low-carbon fuels in the transport sector in 2022

Water

Reach >4 billion people by providing laundry solutions that replace chemicals in 2022

Production & consumption

Gain 500,000 tons of food
by improving efficiency from farm to table in 2022

Inspire the world

Pledge 1% of our time to local outreach activities by 2022

Excite employees

Achieve a score of 81 on our Zymer Spirit index by 2022

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