5

ANYONE, ANYTIME, ANYWHERE

INNOVATION IS EVERYONE’S BUSINESS

Americans have an unfortunate tendency to think of “old” as equivalent to “old-fashioned.” If you’ve ever caught yourself thinking this way, you might like to visit the suburbs of Helsinki, Finland, and drop in at the headquarters of Fiskars Corporation. Make your way through the gleaming lobby of glass, steel, and stone, with its eye-catching art installations that resemble modernist sculptures—all built from products made and marketed by Fiskars. Past the space-age reception desk and the high-tech conference areas, you’ll find a huge exhibit hall with colorful displays highlighting the stylish home products that Fiskars now offers—glassware, ceramics, cookware, cutlery, and more.

The big surprise: one of Europe’s most innovative companies is also one of its oldest. And as the company approaches its 400th birthday, Fiskars and its people are more innovative than ever.

Naturally, innovation at Fiskars is largely about new products. But Fiskars may be even better at innovating new processes—new ways to manufacture, market, sell, and service their products. One big reason: employees at every level of the organization are empowered and encouraged to innovate in every aspect of their work. As a result, all three of the key innovating processes—creation, integration, and reframing—are taking place throughout Fiskars and keeping the company’s innovating engine humming.¹

How Fiskars’ Innovating Engine Operates

Fiskars was born in 1649 when Peter Thorwöste, a Dutch merchant, was given a government charter to create a blast furnace and forging operation in the village of Fiskars (now part of the town of Raseborg, Finland). The products made by Fiskars Corporation during its earliest years included nails, wires, hoes, and wheel reinforcements made from wrought iron. In 1832, the business added a cutlery mill, which made knives, forks, and scissors. The last-named item became Fiskars’ most distinctive product. The best-known design for Fiskars scissors made its debut in 1967, when prototype pairs were produced with distinctive ergonomic plastic handles in a choice of black, green, red, or orange. Fiskars’ employees were asked to vote on their favorite color, and orange won. The color was officially trademarked in 2003, and to this day, many varieties of scissors with “Fiskars orange” handles are prized for their ultra-high quality, durability, and ease and comfort of use.

In recent decades, Fiskars has built on its global reputation as a maker of tools for indoor and outdoor use by expanding into a range of adjacent businesses. Company acquisitions have been part of this strategy. In 2007, Fiskars purchased Iittala, a popular maker of tableware and glassware. In 2013, Fiskars acquired Royal Copenhagen, famous since 1775 for its fine porcelain products; and in 2015, it bought the WWRD group of companies, including such brand names as Waterford, Wedgwood, and Royal Doulton. Today, Fiskars consists of three strategic business units: Vita, which includes the drinkware, tableware, and interior products; Terra, which focuses on gardening and other outdoor activities; and Crea, which offers tools for creativity and crafting, including the famous scissors. With its products available in more than 100 countries, Fiskars’ annual revenues are nearly $1.4 billion (2020).

Business acquisitions have not been the only way that Fiskars has expanded its market footprint. Internally driven innovation has also been a crucial part of the company’s growth strategy. When I spoke with Thomas Enckell, president of Fiskars’ European division, he explained how the company has been implementing the principles of Blue Ocean Strategy, an innovation system that I teach my clients, including the leaders of Fiskars.

“The concept of the value curve,” Enckell said, “has been a valuable tool for us in analyzing the needs of our customers.” (The value curve is a simple diagram that shows how to study the characteristics of a product or service offering in relation to the qualities that customers value.) Enckell went on to explain:

The value curve concept has also helped us enormously in getting to know noncustomers—people who don’t currently use Fiskars products but who could become our customers in the future. What’s more, studying the product qualities that noncustomers say they are seeking has helped us understand how to innovate in ways that our customers may also value. For example, we’ve learned a great deal by listening to the ways professional gardeners evaluate our outdoor tools—pruning shears, axes, spades, rakes, and the like—even though professional gardeners make up just about 10 percent of our market. Their preferences have a kind of halo effect on our offerings: when professionals use our tools, nonprofessionals are encouraged to see them as the best in the world, which supports our consumer sales efforts. We’ve also learned a lot by studying professionals in markets that we don’t serve, looking for common traits. For example, watching and speaking with surgeons as they use and evaluate cutting tools like scalpels has given us insight into ways we can improve the shears and knives we make for use in the kitchen.

Other professional noncustomers whom Fiskars studies and learns from include forestry workers, tractor users, and workers on flower-growing farms. “They use tools like the ones Fiskars makes all day long and at large scale,” says Petteri Masalin, vice president of Design for Fiskars. “That means they are even better sources of information about the job to be done with our tools than the amateur users who typically buy our products.”

As you can already see, Fiskars approaches innovation in a highly methodical fashion. A vivid example is the story behind one of the company’s most successful breakthrough offerings—the Waterwheel, which was Fiskars’ first entry into the highly competitive marketplace for garden watering equipment.

Masalin—known to his friends as “Pepe”—shared some of the details of this story with me. In the process, I learned that the world of watering tools—hoses and irrigation equipment for use in home gardens—is far from simple.

Before Fiskars decided to take the plunge into this challenging business arena, Pepe and his team engaged in extensive research. They came to understand many of the complexities faced by customers seeking the right equipment for using water in their gardens. Some were unexpected but obvious upon reflection—for example, the fact that varying soil types have differing water absorption characteristics that call for equipment capable of delivering moisture at varying rates. (The soil in southern Europe is much dryer than in Scandinavia, which means it takes much longer to get flower beds fully saturated in a Spanish garden than in a Finnish one.)

Other discoveries posed different design challenges—such as the fact that homeowners find themselves adapting their watering equipment for a range of purposes that have nothing to do with gardening. “People use their hoses to wash their bikes or their boats, to spray down their dogs, and to help their kids cool off in the summertime,” Masalin told me. A watering tool that sought to capture a large share of the market ought to be better than the competition at fulfilling all these functions and more. It ought to be easy and reliable to use, unlike many traditional hoses, which are awkward to handle, are difficult to wind and unwind, and have connections that are prone to leaking and breaking. Finally, it should be simple, attractive, and graceful in its appearance—qualities of Nordic design that have long been characteristic of products made by Fiskars.

In Masalin’s view, Fiskars had one big advantage over its competitors—namely, the fact that watering was a brand-new category for Fiskars. “The others in this market have been making hoses and related tools for decades,” he said. “They are accustomed to their traditional ways of thinking, which makes it hard for them to imagine new designs.” Fiskars broke through those conventions. Rather than using the familiar wall-mounted rack on which a hose may be stored, the Waterwheel is an all-in-one device, fitted with wheels, that contains a hose neatly coiled inside it. The user carries the whole kit by its handle and places it horizontally on the ground wherever it will be used.

The user then attaches the inlet hose to the nearest tap, using threaded connectors made of FiberComp, an advanced composite of fiberglass in a thermoset polymer matrix that Fiskars originally developed for use in its axe handles. The FiberComp connectors are extremely light, very strong, resistant to leakage, free of corrosion, and, in chilly weather, much more comfortable to handle than metal.

Now the Waterwheel is ready to use. The 360-degree range of movement it offers makes it easy to spray water in any direction over even a very large home garden. Simple accessories included in the package, like the sprayer support, allow the system to be applied to other uses, such as irrigating a particular spot for a long period of time or setting up a play area for the children on a scorching summer afternoon.

In short, the design that Masalin’s team came up with featured a range of remarkable innovations, all based on the deep customer insights that Fiskars had gathered.

In 2016, an early version of the Waterwheel design was sent to a factory in Poland for manufacturing at a small scale, after which it was test-marketed in Finland for a year. The results were so good that the Waterwheel was soon introduced to markets across Europe. It went on to win a number of design prizes, including the prestigious Red Dot award, presented by an international jury annually since 1955. (Fiskars has been recognized repeatedly by the juries that select Red Dot winners. Most recently, in 2020, the design team headed by Masalin—Pepe—was honored by Red Dot as Design Team of the Year, and Fiskars joined Apple, Ferrari, and Adidas as one of the companies in the Hall of Fame established by Red Dot in 1988.)²

Today, the Waterwheel line of products has been expanded to include several models, with improved materials and new features continually being added. It’s a great example of the systematic innovation process that has helped to make Fiskars such a successful organization.

Of course, as I’ve emphasized throughout this book, innovation is not just about creating new products like the Waterwheel—important as that is. It’s also about creating new ways to serve customers of every kind as well as improved processes that make your organization more efficient, successful, and valuable. Fiskars offers a number of remarkable examples of these kinds of innovations. Here’s the story of one.

Outdoor tools made by Fiskars have long been popular staples at every leading gardening center and hardware store in dozens of countries around the world, especially in Europe. But for a long time, the way Fiskars products were displayed, merchandised, and sold was haphazard, confusing, and inefficient.

Merchandising expert Oliver Zehme joined Fiskars in 2014. In his previous career, he’d worked on marketing fast-moving consumer goods like those sold in drugstores and supermarkets. He built on this experience as he set out to work with retailers and his new colleagues to remedy the shortcomings of Fiskars’ in-store marketing programs.

“A garden center isn’t the same as a supermarket,” Zehme concedes. “But many of the customer behaviors are similar. And we realized that if we redesigned the store displays to take those behaviors into account, we could sell a lot more products.” Zehme set to work creating a new organizational group within Fiskars—a series of Go-To-Market units, each serving a particular geographic market, such as Europe. In each market, the Go-To-Market team would study consumer expectations, interests, and behaviors, and use these to develop unique merchandising systems that would serve those customers better.

At first, Zehme experienced pushback from a handful of his colleagues at Fiskars, who had difficulty understanding why the way products were organized and displayed was so important. “A few people looked at me as if I was from Mars,” he recalls. “They thought I was interested in making the store shelves look more pretty. What a waste of time!”

To demonstrate that rethinking Fiskars’ approach to merchandising could generate real value for both the company and its business partners, Zehme and his team started by spending time analyzing how customers bought outdoor tools. Through visits, observations, interviews, and focus groups, they developed some fundamental understandings of the shopping experience. “People don’t really go into a store to buy a spade,” Zehme explains. “They go there because they want to do a specific job in their backyard or inside their home. So the store should be arranged to make it easy for them to learn how to do that job and to find what they need to do it.”

They also learned a number of more specific facts about tool buyers and their habits—for example, that most shoppers at garden centers are females, which perhaps explains why heavy-duty cutting tools like axes don’t sell very well there. (Men in search of chopping tools are much more likely to visit hardware stores instead.) Insights like these gave the team ideas about how to customize their merchandising plans to fit specific categories of retailers—for example, by giving garden centers displays of lighter, easier-to-use cutting tools that could serve as alternatives to axes.

To test their innovative insights, Zehme convinced one of Fiskars’ biggest accounts—a garden center near Munich—to collaborate on an experiment. Rather than organizing tools by category, they worked together to create customized displays based around specific tasks—for example, preparing a flower bed for planting or installing a picket fence. All the tools needed for the task would be grouped together, along with complementary products (such as soil and fertilizer for the flower beds) as well as “substitutional” products (such as utility knives and hatchets that could be used in place of an axe or saw). The various tools and products would be arranged visually from left to right in a way that mirrored the steps in the process, from start to finish. Informational displays were created, describing exactly how the homeowner should tackle the task and offering guidance on selecting the most appropriate tools.

Within a month, the first set of innovative displays was unveiled in the Munich store. Zehme dubbed it the Ambassador system. Within three days, 2 other stores from the same garden center chain were demanding the same system, and after a month, all 12 stores in the chain had asked to be included. The next year’s sales figures reflected a 50 percent increase in the sell-through of Fiskars products.

This was a significant victory because Germany has long been one of the toughest European marketplaces for Fiskars. (Unlike its home market of Finland, where the Fiskars brand is on everybody’s lips, Germany is an ultra-competitive market where many brands from around the world do battle.) The fact that the Ambassador system had made such a splash in the Munich area boded well for its impact across the continent. Sure enough, by 2016, the Ambassador system had been successfully rolled out to more than 1,900 stores all over Europe. Zehme and his team began developing similar innovative programs to enhance marketing for other categories of Fiskars products, such as kitchen tools.

The R&D and design teams at Fiskars do an effective job of innovating new products, much as they’ve done throughout the company’s history. But as the Ambassador story suggests, Fiskars is also an extraordinary innovator when it comes to other business processes. As of 2021, the ideas behind the Ambassador system are being applied to Fiskars’ other business units.

Innovating Without Boundaries: The Built to Innovate (BTI) Framework for an Innovating Engine

A close look at how innovating happens at Fiskars illustrates the fact that the three processes of innovating don’t occur in isolation from one another, nor do they necessarily fit into a neat sequence or system. Creation, integration, and reframing may often occur simultaneously, overlapping and influencing one another. They may also take place—indeed, they should take place—in every company department and at every level of the organization.

My study of how such innovation-centered companies operate helped me to develop the framework depicted in the Introduction to this book. For your convenience, we repeat it here, as Figure 5.1. It’s a three-by-three framework that illustrates how all three levels of an organization can participate in all three processes of innovating, thereby creating an innovating engine that is operating at maximum efficiency. (An expanded version of the BTI framework with additional information about the processes appears in the Appendix.)

As Figure 5.1 shows, all three processes—creation, integration, and reframing—should be taking place at any given time in each of the three major levels in most organizations. But notice that these processes operate somewhat differently and to varying degrees at each level. Among frontline innovators, the most important process is creation, which mainly takes the form of generating ideas—although frontline innovators take part in integration and reframing as well. Among midlevel coaches, integration is the most important process, although they also participate in creation and reframing. And among senior leaders, reframing is the most important process, though they too are involved in all three processes. In each column of Figure 5.1, the relative size of the cells reflects the degree of importance that each process plays in the work of that group of employees.

FIGURE 5.1 The BTI Framework
Innovation by Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere—How the Three Processes of Innovating Take Place at Three Levels of an Organization

Let’s use Fiskars as an example of how each of the three core processes of innovating gets played out at each level of a well-run innovating engine.

The creation process, in which a stream of innovative ideas is continuously generated, happens largely at the level of frontline innovators. People who work directly with customers (and noncustomers) often have special insights into customer needs, problems, and wishes, which may trigger ideas for new products or services. Similarly, people directly engaged with hands-on technological or design work—such as engineers, scientists, programmers, artists, packagers, materials experts, and manufacturing specialists—often find that new ideas arise from their daily interactions with products and services the company offers as well as with important noncustomers such as suppliers, researchers, and outside consultants.

This certainly happens at Fiskars. Masalin and his cross-functional design team spent hours observing and talking with customers before they set about creating their innovative design for the Waterwheel system. Similarly, Zehme’s ideas that ultimately gave rise to the Ambassador system arose largely through his visits to retailers and his conversations with store managers and salespeople who were directly involved in selling Fiskars products in retail settings.

Similar idea-generating activities take place at the frontline level of Fiskars on a regular basis. Every business unit has what’s called a customer insight group—an interdisciplinary team of employees whose job is to record and analyze what customers, suppliers, salespeople, and others are saying about shifting market dynamics. Trends and opportunities discerned by the customer insight group members often give rise to new ideas for products, services, or process improvements.

Similar frontline discoveries happen at Fiskars’ R&D facilities. These include kitchens, gardens, and workshops that are used not just by Fiskars’ own engineers and scientists but by outside professionals who are not typical Fiskars’ customers but who use similar kinds of tools—chefs, gardeners, woodworkers, interior designers, and so on. They’re invited to work in the Fiskars’ facilities, using existing products and testing prototypes of new ones. The members of the Fiskars team observe the professionals in action, noting how the company’s products work well (and when they don’t), asking and answering questions, and exploring challenges that might suggest ways the Fiskars products could be improved or supplemented. Even its classic scissors continue to be rethought and improved through this process, with variant designs to serve an ever-diversifying array of customers and purposes continually being developed and introduced.³

In these and other ways, frontline innovators at Fiskars are given the opportunities and resources they need to create a steady stream of innovative concepts. But midlevel coaches and senior leaders also have roles to play in the creation process.

Midlevel coaches, for example, are the first ones to give the employees they supervise permission to innovate. They must also provide these employees with the tools and resources needed to generate innovative ideas, as well as the freedom to devote time and energy to innovation. At Fiskars, the understanding that this is an important part of the middle management role is deeply rooted. “We’ve embraced the concept of continuous improvement,” Enckell told me, “which means that our frontline people are encouraged to think every day about how our products and services can be made better. It’s not just about inventing new products or new product lines. It’s about small changes that accumulate over time, generating big improvements in the value we create for customers.”

Senior leaders at Fiskars also support and guide the overall creation process through the strategic and managerial actions they take. For example, they organize companywide activities designed to encourage and incentivize innovation. These include Idea Days, during which outside companies that partner with Fiskars (such as retailers and suppliers) are invited to work with Fiskars’ experts on brainstorming innovations that can produce value for everyone involved.

Senior leaders are also responsible for identifying the most promising areas of future growth for Fiskars based on their understanding of the global market, competitive pressures, demographic trends, technological developments, and other factors. These ideas are formally defined and updated annually in a document known as the Five-Year Innovation Master Plan, which designates specific areas of focus that the senior leaders ask the middle managers and frontline employees to emphasize in their innovative work. Senior leaders also define the standards of excellence, value-creation, and profitability by which potential innovations are judged.

There’s a level of creative tension that’s inherent in this process of target- and standard-setting. Kari Kauniskangas, then CEO of Fiskars, summed up his approach to the challenge this way: “It’s important for me to make sure our people have the desire, will, and freedom to find better ways of doing business. In search of new ideas, we have to give them permission to go crazy! But we also have to create boxes that define their focus and challenge people to innovate in the areas of greatest need.”

Making this balancing act work smoothly is a leadership challenge. It helps that Fiskars is a relatively small company (currently about 7,000 employees). “I know almost everyone at Fiskars,” Pepe says. “That makes it easy to sustain an atmosphere of trust and cooperation.” And Christian Bachler, whose roots are Austrian, observes that Fiskars’ relatively flat hierarchy leads to a democratic corporate culture that seems “very Finnish.” “Anyone feels free to share their views,” Bachler says, “and even to challenge anyone else. It’s clear that everybody can make a difference at Fiskars, and everyone feels empowered to do so.”

The integration process at Fiskars is largely driven by midlevel coaches. For example, middle managers at Fiskars organize and manage the system whereby new ideas are turned into concrete projects for development and possible implementation. When a promising concept surfaces, middle management chooses one frontline worker to capture its core attributes in the form of a project template. This template is used to guide the stage-gate process by which the concept is gradually developed and refined, which may include the creation of a simple prototype and its testing by potential customers in a workshop at Fiskars or an outside facility, such as a university lab. If the concept continues to appear promising after these tests are completed, it becomes the formal “property” of an appropriate business unit. The midlevel management team that runs this unit is then responsible for integrating the new idea into everyday business operations as part of Fiskars’ execution engine, helping to generate economic value for the company as well as for its customers and its business partners.

The process for developing and implementing innovative ideas is itself continually being refined and improved at Fiskars, largely through the efforts of midlevel managers. For example, Jari Ikaheimonen, business manager for Fiskars’ Plant Care business department, told me about how he has worked to make the process of evaluating innovative ideas both simpler and more accurate. Having participated in a similar exercise at a previous company, he recommended that Fiskars adopt a tool known as the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) matrix, which helps team members define specific data they can use to zero in on the product and service characteristics that customers value most. “The result has been an improvement in the quality of our decisions,” Ikaheimonen says. “Our sales forecasts for new products are now more accurate, which makes the overall innovation process less risky.” Most recently, a new incubator group has been established that is responsible for evaluating and selecting proposals for brand-new business units. Any employee can submit a proposal to this group.

Of course, integration also engages the efforts of frontline innovators and senior leaders. Frontline workers support integration when they work on the project development and testing process, as well as when they participate in interdepartmental and multidisciplinary teams and meetings that spread innovating ideas and activities throughout the company. And senior leaders shape the overall integration process through the corporate governance decisions they make—for example, in designing and overseeing the project development system, and in crafting employee evaluation and compensation programs that incentivize innovating.

Finally, the reframing process is driven, above all, by the company’s senior leaders. The C-suite executives in an organization are responsible for the long-term strategic thinking that defines the future of the business—which, in turn, shapes the nature of innovation at the company and the way employees imagine and envision their work. This is a task that Fiskars CEO Kari Kauniskangas was deeply engaged in when I visited the company’s headquarters. (He has since retired from the position; as of 2021, Nathalie Ahlström holds the role of Fiskars CEO.)

When I met with Kauniskangas, he listed for me some of the most urgent reframing questions he and his team were grappling with. They included: How are Fiskars’ customers and their preferences changing? How are the distribution channels we use for our products evolving? What are the implications of these changes for the nature of the work we do? Twenty years from now, will Fiskars continue to sell products in stores, or will our business model have completely changed? Will we be providing access to products through some kind of subscription model rather than through traditional purchasing methods? Will we use 3D printing or other forms of additive manufacturing to localize the design and production of tools? Will our business become primarily a matter of developing and selling intellectual property?

In short, the CEO and C-suite team are continually asking, What kind of company does Fiskars need to become to continue to win in the future? This is the kind of ultimate reframing question that needs to guide the innovative thinking of today’s organizations.

Guided by the reframing thinking that takes place at the highest levels of the company, midlevel coaches and frontline innovators at Fiskars are engaging in similar kinds of open-ended discovery. They play a major role in ensuring that a culture of innovating permeates the organization at all levels. In this way, the commitment to innovation that the senior leaders embrace can be turned into concrete actions that produce measurable, valuable results both for Fiskars and for all the company’s stakeholders.

During one of my visits to Fiskars, business manager Jari Ikaheimonen made a comment that helped me see how the spirit of reframing has impacted his work at the middle-manager level. “Fiskars is an old, well-established company with a great tradition that we all appreciate,” he said. “But today it has also become a fast-growing organization filled with young people who don’t feel limited by that tradition. We honor the past, but we don’t feel as though we have to own it or defend it. We have permission to innovate in ways that will ensure that Fiskars remains creative and relevant to generations to come.”

And Christian Bachler, at that time another midlevel manager in charge of Fiskars’ kitchen tools business, captured the same reframing spirit even more succinctly. “Fiskars,” he said with a smile, “is a 370-year-old startup.”⁴

Reframing with a Global Mindset

In 2019, responding to changes in the world economy, in customer preferences, and in environmental pressures, Fiskars embarked on a particularly ambitious innovating program. Known as Vintage Service, this initiative is about making Fiskars a pioneer in what sustainability experts call the circular economy, in which waste is eliminated through the continuous reuse and recycling of all resources and materials. In 2016, Finland became the first country in the world to publish a road map for achieving the circular economy. As one of Finland’s leading corporations, Fiskars has been eager to play its part.

Some of the ways Fiskars is working to reduce waste and improve the sustainability of its manufacturing and marketing efforts are similar to those employed by other companies. For example, during 2019, the Gerber brand of specialized knives and other tools, owned by Fiskars, redesigned its packaging and shipping practices to reduce the volume of plastic used and substitute fully recyclable and renewable materials. Similarly, the Iittala factory in Finland has introduced a special version of its popular Raami tumbler made entirely from reused waste glass—one of the first such industrial products in the world. And between 2017 and 2019, the total amount of material sent to landfills by Fiskars companies fell by 61 percent, with further reductions expected to follow.

However, beyond all these laudable efforts, Fiskars is also developing an innovative business model designed particularly to shift the company in the direction of the circular economy. This is the idea that underlies the Vintage Service project. In the words of Nora Haatainen, business director of Vintage Service, “Our aim is to reuse or recycle all the waste generated within our manufacturing facilities and send no waste to landfills.”⁵

Customers participate in Vintage Service by selling used glass and ceramic tableware made by the Iittala and Arabia brands back to the company. Fiskars then resells the products to other customers. Items that can’t be resold because they are broken will be accepted for recycling in other forms—for example, ceramics are ground into power that is used in brick production, while glass items are transformed into building insulation.

In addition to generating environmental benefits, the Vintage Service system is creating new forms of value for loyal Fiskars customers. Lotta Eskolin is service manager for the Vintage program. “The selection of Vintage items in each store changes every day,” she says, “and we’ve seen gems from decades past and recent years alike. Our customers find missing parts of their collections or complement their table setting with items like sugar bowls or sauce boats. Timeless, thoughtful design lasts for years, and can be passed from one generation to the next.”⁶

Customers have embraced the Vintage Service system enthusiastically. Within a few months of its launch, Fiskars estimated that Vintage Service had already reduced waste of natural resources by more than 133 tons, while also reducing carbon emissions by more than 45 tons. By October 2020, Vintage Service had been introduced at every Iittala and Arabia retail store in Finland; expansion into stores in Sweden was about to begin; and Fiskars had broadened the program to include acceptance of all manufacturers’ brands of tableware for recycling (though not for resale).

Vintage Service is a great illustration of how large-scale reframing concepts can become the basis of practical innovations for frontline employees and midlevel managers to design and implement. The circular economy is an idea that is much bigger than Fiskars or even the Finnish national economy. It’s an attempt to redefine how human beings interact with their environment in order to make our connection with the planet more healthy and sustainable.

In a world confronted by multiple crises, from climate change and global pandemics to economic inequality and social injustice, innovative thinking and action at this level is becoming increasingly important. Companies like Fiskars, where all the innovative processes are at work at every level of the organization, are leading the way.

In this chapter, we’ve seen how the three processes of innovating can permeate your entire organization, thereby maximizing the power and value of the innovative capability of your people. In the next three chapters, we’ll look even more closely at each of these levels of the organization and discuss in more detail the roles played by workers at each level in the overall work of innovating.