Linking Strategy With Innovation at Hager Group Within HYPE Innovation

Founded in 1955 by brothers Hermann Hager and Dr. Oswald Hager, alongside their father Peter, Hager Group is an independent, family-owned business headquartered in Blieskastel, Germany. The organization, which embodies the cultural diversity of its European roots, how has a global footprint that extends to 20 production sites worldwide and serves customers in over 100 countries. With 12,900 dedicated employees, Hager Group had a turnover of around €2.8 billion in 2022.

The company is at the forefront of innovation in the electrical installations sector for residential, commercial, and industrial buildings. Its diverse range of components and solutions encompasses energy distribution, cable management, wiring accessories, building automation, security systems, and energy management, all under trusted brands such as Hager, Berker, Elcom, E3/DC, Bocchiotti/Iboco, Pmflex, and Eficia.

• Information accessibility and overview of strategic foresight

It was difficult to track external trends that had been identified and internal foresight data that had been used for informed decision-making.

• No tool to visualize the bridge between strategy and innovation

Before adopting HYPE’s innovation management software, Hager Group faced challenges in depicting the mapping between the bridge strategy and innovation.

In 2015, Hager Group started researching the tools and software available on the market to enhance its innovation program. After thorough research, the company chose HYPE‘s Smart Innovation Platform to reimagine its ideation program and enhance collaborative innovation across the organization. As well as meeting the company’s innovation needs, HYPE’s full compliance with GDPR and German employment policies was a key factor for Hager Group.

The onboarding process was smooth, and HYPE’s consulting support was crucial for ensuring that the platform‘s functionality was successfully adopted.

In 2020, having identified the challenges highlighted above, Hager Group started to use HYPE’s strategy module.

While implementation of HYPE’s strategic features is ongoing, there are already some clear benefits, including:

• The use of HYPE software made it possible to share the vision of the world in 2030 which had been defined by a cross-functional team.

• Based on the vision of the future world, Hager group linked different innovation topics to the strategy and made the entire approach transparent.

• All trends influencing the business could be identified and treated to make decisions. Since implementing HYPE’s ideation and strategy functionalities, the “why” behind each innovation project is much easier to justify. Management can clearly and transparently see how each project is connected to the company’s overall strategy and why one project was chosen over another.

The Vision of Our Future Is Visible to Everyone

HYPE’s software has enabled Hager Group to share its business vision of the future with every employee so that everyone understands where the company is facing and can take an active role in impacting the direction of the organization. Innovation is no longer happening behind closed doors and is visible to everyone.

Iteration and Update of Our Future Envisioning

By involving multiple stakeholders into the process and making it visible, we build a vision that could be revisited and updated using a process proposed by HYPE.

Future Plans

The goal is to create a cohesive innovation management tool by engaging the community and strong commitment by submitting more trends including our customers’ view.

To provide a clear view of the ecosystem, it will be great then to make the links between trends, insights, etc. to the innovation projects. Indeed, it will facilitate decision-making and visualize project progression linked to the vision directly.