A Two-Sided Approach for Digital Innovation at SCHOTT

(a) Situation faced: SCHOTT, a global player in the specialty glass and glass-ceramics industry, offers a wide variety of products, among which it’s Business Unit Tubing (SCHOTT Tubing) focuses on semi-products for various industries, e.g., pharmaceutical packaging. By enhancing the production quality with initiatives like perfeXion® and dedicated data collection throughout the whole product life cycle, SCHOTT Tubing, driven by a sense of ambition rather than a sense of urgency, strives to shape the digital transformation of its business and the entire industry. Against this backdrop, SCHOTT Tubing launched the first B2B e-commerce platform and strives to leverage this digital infrastructure for creating additional digital services. Yet, exploring innovative digital services poses a significant challenge for established businesses in the B2B context that demand sound methodological guidance. (b) Action taken: To face this challenge, SCHOTT Tubing applied a novel innovation approach that combined both problem-oriented and resource-oriented innovation approaches. This included an initial ideation phase with an international workshop format followed by a concept phase with iterative, customer-focused evaluation cycles in an interdisciplinary sprint team. (c) Results achieved: The presented case shows a target-oriented approach for incumbents to combine both problem-oriented and resource-oriented approaches to develop and evaluate digital service innovation effectively. Throughout the ideation phase, 14 SCHOTT employees developed over 50 digital service ideas. By using the introduced innovation approach, five ideas were prioritized for the concept phase. These ideas were tested and further detailed in close collaboration with SCHOTT Tubing’s customers. Besides, SCHOTT Tubing thereby enhanced knowledge of innovation methods and fostered an innovative culture among the participants. (d) Lessons learned: Beyond commonly applied approaches that solely focus on the customers’ problems, SCHOTT Tubing instead also paid attention to their resources, including customers, assets, or internal services as types of resources to drive ideas in the field of digital service innovation. In addition to the generated digital service ideas, this case provides valuable methodological insights: It reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the two-sided approach of the sequentially applied problem- and resource-oriented innovation methods.