The 21st edition of this year’s Innovation Camp tested 60 students from across different local schools on their ability to solve a business challenge put forward by Cactus. Broken up into several groups, they were tasked to imagine how Cactus would interact and communicate with their customers in the future.
On the 9th of March, the groups of students were given time from early in the morning until late in the afternoon to draw up their ideas and put together a quick PowerPoint presentation for their business plan. During the day organized by the Jonk Entrepreneuren Luxembourg assocation, the students, who were given a tall order, were accompanied and assisted by various experts who helped the students out with their expertise in the area, along with answering any inquiries the students might have.
At the end of the day, in front of a jury, every group was given a couple of minutes to explain their vision of how Cactus will interact with their customers in the future. The jury consisted of representatives of household companies like POST Group, House of Training, Arendt&Medernach, and Cactus, who were committed to finding the best three ideas from the proposed concepts by the different groups of students.
Experimental and original ideas were brought up by the different teams. Full digitalization is the collective understanding of what the future at Cactus looks like for every student. For instance, a fully virtual supermarket was a concept by the 2nd prize-winning group the Metateam. Their view of a shopping trip in the future would require a virtual reality device, putting the customer in a computer-generated Cactus supermarket where he is able to go shopping as he normally would.
Other concepts of other teams consisted of improved phone applications for Cactus with features like a completed list of nutrients for each product, a map helping lost customers, a personalized list of preferred products, or various promotions displayed on the app. The winning team, team Yuppi Club, came up with a similar concept of an application simplifying a customer’s shopping experience with promotional gifts for using the app regularly with child-friendly services.
When you think about the future, the supermarket rarely comes up, making for an interesting topic for especially young students to think on. Today’s social media influenced the ideas of the students, which managed to help them create modern alternatives to shopping.
In contrast to the more conservative way of thinking about food retailing, this helped to blow a fresh wind of interesting thoughts to the judges, which might change the way we think about going to Cactus in the near future.
