KONE Corporation, one of the world’s leading elevator and escalator companies, has made a new breakthrough in a strategically important segment. In collaboration with UnSeen, digital service products are being developed to enhance KONE’s competitiveness and generate revenue.
Challenge: Growth from Digital Development Alongside Core Products
KONE’s core products, namely elevators and escalators, are well-known around the world. However, the company aims to seek profitable growth and differentiation not only through its core expertise but also through new solutions that create customer value. This is where KONE turned its attention to digital products and services.
With over a hundred years of experience, KONE knows how to develop, manufacture, and maintain elevators. However, the operational models that work in elevator product development may not necessarily be suitable for modern digital services. Recognizing this challenge, KONE wanted a capable partner for digital development. The goal was to create a revenue-generating service from scratch and to foster a new organizational culture that supports innovation and agile development.
Solution: Remove Unnecessary Features, Replace Them with Pure Added Value
KONE’s innovation team, strengthened by UnSeen’s expertise, took the initiative and began creating digital services alongside elevators during the construction phase. Ideas were not left to marinate on the drawing board; instead, the team immediately engaged with customers to listen to and identify the challenges faced on construction sites. Using the insights from data gathering, prototypes were created swiftly and with an open-minded approach, testing their potential with pilot clients.
By applying Lean start-up methods, the development process consisted of a cycle of testing, measuring, and learning. This allowed cost-effective and quick exploration of various product features and development directions. Iteration by iteration, the vision became clearer, and ultimately, even 80% of the features and contents initially considered were discarded. What remained were only the features that provided added value and for which customers were willing to pay.
This is how the internationally awarded KONE SiteFlow was created, a system that enhances the efficiency of elevator use on construction sites while providing builders with effective tools to control site traffic. For example, it can restrict access to certain floors and speed up the delivery of critical resources between floors.
“KONE is admirably bold in its use of modern operational models, where even unfinished ideas are confidently presented to customers for testing. Our role was to support the innovation team’s development work and offer the necessary expertise flexibly at different stages of the project—service and business design, product management, software development, data analytics, and other technological expertise required for development,” says Esa Alanen, UnSeen’s Agilizer expert, who played a key role in the project.
UnSeen has productized the agile digital development model used by KONE for adoption by other organizations – get to know UnSeen Agilizer.
Result: A product Innovated from Scratch Generates Revenue and Goes Global
KONE SiteFlow has received an extremely positive reception from customers, and demand has surpassed all the targets set for the development phase. The product is now ready for sales and deliveries to be scaled to a global level. Everything looks promising for the product to become a success.
“We have managed to create something from scratch that is already generating real revenue. This is a big deal for our company as a whole, but also for the innovation team that has grown along the way. We now plan to leverage the proven model in new projects,” says Janne Öfversten, Digital Innovation Lead at KONE.
KONE SiteFlow is a great example of how digital development based on lean start-up methods can create highly relevant products, even from scratch—customer-driven, agile, and, most importantly, profitable.
Learn more about how UnSeen’s Agilizer can help your organization innovate successfully.
Experimental product development requires different areas of expertise at various stages, and UnSeen meets this need.
1. The CTBUH Innovation Award for high-rise construction
9000 elevator trips/day
+60% potential increase in trips/day identified with KONE SiteFlow
1.84M elevator rides during the cosntruction of the Icon of the Seas ship
