Suppose that you run one of the most modern tire plants in the world. Your lines run around the clock, your processes are world-class, and your engineers think in numbers. Now you want something no machine can deliver: a culture in which every team keeps finding better ways of doing things. That was the ambition of Continental Tyres Thailand. Its plant in Rayong began production in 2019 and had around 700 employees when our collaboration began. Plant Manager Vignesh Devasenapathy and Christian Krafft, Head of Product Industrialization, set out to build a culture of Creative Continuous Improvement. Over three years, X-IDEA became its engine.

On November 22, 2021, Thinkergy founder Dr. D kicked off the journey with a keynote for top management on why a fast-changing business world rewards creative improvement. In parallel, we TIPS-profiled the senior team (see the companion case below). In May 2022, the managers went through a three-day X-IDEA Innovation Playshop. Here we met an interesting paradox. Unsurprisingly, TIPS had shown a leadership team with a strongly operational, numbers-driven profile, and for some, the Playshop felt too playful to be practical. Yet the same play opened them up creatively, and that confidence came back as soon as the work became real. It also confirmed a principle that shaped everything that followed: first train people creatively, then let them apply it to real problems. In other words, play opened the door, and real projects gave people a reason to walk through it.

On August 31, 2022, the managers proposed ten innovation projects and selected the three with the highest bottom-line impact: removing a bottleneck at the first stage of the production line, improving machine maintenance, and engaging frontline workers in a 24/7 operation. Three teams of about ten each, composed with the help of TIPS, worked through X-IDEA’s stages. After an Xploration kickoff on March 13, 2023, the teams went into the field with exploration assignments and presented their insights at an Xploration checkout on May 26. These insights sharpened each project’s Final Challenge. On June 22–23, 2023, a two-day IDEA workshop took the teams through Ideation, Development, Evaluation, and Action. “It was a good learning to see how many ideas can be generated if approaching the same situation with different tools repeatedly,” reflected one project lead. In the final pitch, standing in front of a red “We know how to WOW!” banner, the co-lead of the bottleneck team summed up his team’s work: “I fully believe that the ideas will solve the bottleneck.” All three projects delivered actionable concepts with significant estimated bottom-line impact.

Then the plant leadership took the boldest step: making X-IDEA their own. Two new cohorts of 30 managers and engineers went through two-day X-IDEA trainings. We TIPS-profiled and interviewed a shortlist, and selected twelve candidates with the right mix of change energy and people energy. On November 26–28, 2024, Dr. D trained them in a streamlined, process-focused variant of X-IDEA. All twelve passed and became certified in-house X-IDEA innovation facilitators. When Dr. D checked in about eight months later, Continental’s C-Team (Creative Continuous Improvement) was running X-IDEA projects with operational teams on its own. Ultimately, the best measure of success is that the plant no longer needs us to keep innovating.

Do you run a high-performing operation, yet want your people to keep finding better ways of working, long after the consultants have left? Contact us to find out how X-IDEA may help you train your teams in creative thinking, apply it to real projects with bottom-line impact, and build an in-house innovation team that keeps the momentum going.

Read the companion story: how TIPS built the teams behind this transformation.