On October 27th a large group of young professionals of Facilicom joined forces to generate innovative ideas with societal impact for their own organization. They were inspired by the UN Sustainable Development Goals and translated relevant societal issues such as loneliness among elderly, traffic jams and improvement of quality of life into new innovative business concepts for Facilicom.
Young Facilicom is ambitious to stimulate more entrepreneurship within the organization and therefore organized a so called Corporate Social Entrepreneurship (CSE) Lab for their incompany youth association. The session started with a talk on (social) intrapreneurship and innovation by Marieke den Nijs of Outside Inc. and after that they were challenged to define ambitious societal challenges which they could solve through Facilicom. Marieke explained that “Nowadays companies can only grow through innovation which is relevant for society as a whole. Young professionals are key in realizing such innovations, since they have the intrapreneurial spirit and motivation to make difference”.
In teams the group generated a huge amount of innovative ideas to a variety of different challenges. This resulted in short pitches to a panel of clients and management of Facilicom. They were very impressed by the quantity and quality of the ideas. Rogier Verbeek (director klant & markt) observed that “people stepping outside of their daily work and working with different disciplines in the organization really brings out the best in them”.
The ideas were presented on large carton boxes explaining their call to action, corporate capabilities, innovative idea(s), societal impact and a visualization. The boxes will be used to inspire the organization as a whole and Michel de Groot (chairman of Young Facilicom) said that “we will occupy the CEO’s office with all the ideas and boxes”. Chantal Bot-Roovers added that Facilicom with its large spread network has the ability to improve quality of life and bring happiness to huge groups of people”. The session is therefore a first step in stimulating more entrepreneurship and bring (social) innovation forward.
In December the group will work on further development of the ideas and validate them among their clients and consumers. Beginning of December a pressure cooker session will be organized in order to develop the ideas further and bring them into reality.