The layoffs and offloading of Deutsche Post’s commercial assets were chiefly driven by the realisation that declining demand for traditional postal services – then decreasing around 1 to 2 per cent annually in many countries – was not simply a temporary blip but actually indicative of a lasting change in society. “We realised that being a national postal provider was an endangered business, that we had to redefine the role of postal providers in a digital world,” said Clemens Beckmann, executive vice president of innovation for the German post office’s mail division, when speaking to The New York Times in 2011. In subsequent years, Beckmann’s observation has been echoed by postal executives across the globe as countries seek to reimagine their services for citizens who no longer send letters, but who increasingly receive packages given the rise of e-commerce. By and large, however, imaginative solutions to postal difficulties are constrained by their status as public services and their need to deliver to every citizen’s address, six days a week. Consequently, strategies for reinvention have largely concentrated on the creation of digital services and cost savings. In this climate of change, France’s La Poste has sought fresh ideas to stem declining revenues and believes it may have found one solution in a peculiar combination of consumer-focused design and Silicon Valley culture. Two years ago, La Poste announced the creation of Yellow Innovation (named for the colour of La Poste’s corporate identity), a start-upinspired research hub to develop and test new products for the consumer market. “People don’t send letters anymore,” says Philippe Mihelic, Yellow Innovation’s creative director. “The rate goes down by around 8 per cent per year, but La Poste employs 250,000 people. It must provide different services – develop the business in other ways – to maintain those jobs.” Although France is not traditionally renowned for its start-up industries, in 2016 alone – the same year that Yellow Innovation was founded – technology start-ups in France, including ridesharing BlaBlaCar and audio brand Devialet, raised €2.2bn. In one of the city’s former rail stations, the incubator Station F opened its mammoth doors in late 2017 with space for 1,000 ventures. Funded in part by the billionaire telecoms entrepreneur Xavier Niel, and supported by the likes of Facebook and Microsoft, it’s now the largest organisation of its kind in the world. “It’s a curious wave,” Mihelic says. “France has had a culture of innovation which no one knew
about before, but digitalisation has really made everything explode. At CES [the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where Yellow Innovation presents new products], we are now the nation with the fifth-largest presence.” During the heyday of mail, huge volumes of post were delivered multiple times a day – in France, as elsewhere. In early 20th-century London, for example, many districts carried out 12 deliveries daily; today, there’s only one a day and none on Sunday. Between 1907 and 1915, the US Postal Service estimated that one billion penny postcards were mailed each year. But since the 2000s, and the rise of both email and e-commerce, industrialised nations have largely turned away from snail-mail and towards package shipping as citizens increasingly shop online. Although this is rarely appreciated, most national post offices are mainly business-to-business companies, explains Mihelic. “The post delivers parcels to you, but you aren’t really a client of the post; you are only one step in the delivery process,” he says. “Because [letter services] were disrupted by email, and because we deliver less mail and more packages, La Poste must speak to the end-user directly and create new services.” Yellow Innovation emerged as the direct result of such concerns. La Poste is divided into five branches: Services-Mail-Parcels, La Banque Postale, Network La Poste, GeoPost and Digital Services. It was from the Digital Services branch that the idea first emerged for an innovation hub to design consumer products. “La Poste is actually a big driver of innovation, but it has always focused on incremental business-to-business innovation, such as how to improve logistics and efficiencies,” says Mihelic. “Yellow Innovation is the only division to focus on new services for the consumer market. We take ideas and make the best prototype possible in four months before testing it on the market.” If a prototype should prove successful, Yellow would either hand it over to one of the five branches for industrialisation, or work out how to manufacture and bring it to market itself. In practice, Yellow Innovation has the freedom to identify problems or projects for development across any of the five branches of La Poste, or indeed any broader social topics of interest. “We work in many different ways because our mission is to help people,” says Mihelic. “When we hear people say that they have a problem in life, that’s the kind of problem we would like to resolve.” To address such issues, 108