Insights

Open Innovation Leads to Successful POC for Retail Tech Company

Michael Marx, Vice President of Innovation, UST Innovation Israel

A recent study by Gartner shows companies typically allocate 90% of their tech budget to “keeping the lights on” or ‘incremental innovation,’ while only 10% of that can be deemed transformative. Thankfully, companies today are openly adopting a new mindset and a willingness to explore new ways of working.

Shekel Brainweigh Retail Innovation Division (SBW) is a transformative company that offers advanced weigh-based solutions for the global retail markets. SBW grew out of a traditional scales company called Shekel and its IP includes unique Product Aware technology that can identify products by their weight only – a technology innovation based on Smart Load sensors together with advanced Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence algorithms and models. When combined, the SBW portfolio offers disruptive technology and ground-breaking solutions for the emerging autonomous retail segment.

Recently, SBW partnered with UST through UST Innovation Israel - to help retailers open the gates to open innovation. Together, we’ve put a proof of concept for a new automated retail device geared at selling high-end lifestyle products.

UST Innovation Israel worked with SBW to design an accurate customer journey, entirely based on the UI perspective. The POC included developing an intuitive AI-based application, a Smart Cabinet, that provides all inventory and purchase summaries to the end-user.

Both parties collaborated to produce an advanced shelving unit with technological features such as door sensors, weighing shelves, and automated door capabilities for each product. Overall, the successful cooperation between both parties amidst the constraints of the pandemic placed on the supply chain and the logistics and ideation efforts yielded a successful POC and GTM strategy.

In the spirit of ‘open innovation, the company joined forces with global entities to develop and manufacture their product. These collaborations combined cross-disciplinary expertise and managed it across borders – Spanning from the US through Malaysia, India, and Israel.

The companies aligned on a united vision and recognized that cross-pollination would be the best way to encourage new ideas and the strongest results. This basic understanding of how open innovation enables agility allowed SBW to become a game-changer for the future of retail as they stepped outside of their previous model of the building to co-create in a broader innovation ecosystem.

Ultimately, through this global POC, UST and SBW developed a new set of capabilities for developing and marketing a fresh and open approach to innovation that brings ground-breaking capabilities to retail and consumer markets.

To learn more about growth opportunities with open innovation, contact UST Innovation Israel.