Analyzing Greenhouse Group

Greenhouse Group is a innovative company based in Eindhoven, Amsterdam and Sittard. Greenhouse is a leading online - and tech marketing orientated company. They are an umbrella organisation for Blue Mango, Blossom, Fresh Fruit Digital, LemonPi and Pubnxt. Their core values are: Innovation, Dedication, and fun. These core values are carried out by their 500+ dedicated experts. They believe that consumer friendly marketing is a combination of data, technology, creativity, and media.

I’ve visited this inspiring company in February and researched them on these particular questions:

1. How does this organization value innovative thinking/entrepeneurship?

2. How do they organize innovative thinking/ entrepreneurship? Who promotes innovation throughout the company?

3. How are these innovations applied to their daily projects/advice towards customers?

4.How does this knowledge relate to your own professional development?

Read the findings here.

Innovative thinking is highly encouraged in Greenhouse Group. It’s also in their core values. They say that their marketing is based on a combination of technology, data, media, and the most important one, creatiivty. Creativity leads to innovative thinking. Personal development/ innovation is also encouraged by the company, since every employee has a personal development plan. They even go further regarding the personal development. They prioritize this over corporate development. Since they believe that personal innovation leads to corporate innovation. So, they believe in this on a macro-scale, every employee has a part in this process.

Innovation flows trough the company. The company is organized around the McKinsey Horizon Model (McKinzey, 2009).

Horizon 1 is Greenhouse Group, 2 is Boom, 3 is Labs. In labs they keep an eye on innovation trends around the world. In Boom, they create concepts for these trends which often result in start-ups and products. And Greenhouse Group itself, creates campaigns for these companies and works for big clients like Vodafone and Kruidvat (Ploeg, 2020).

In all three ‘horizons’ they have multidisciplinary teams that create the most innovative concepts. That’s the way they work. They believe that this is effective. When this works, recruitment and PR will folow. At the moment their are over 50 innovations running troughout the company. Because they work in task forces, different perspectives of products and concepts are being created. So, this results in a full body concept for a customer or an innovation. And because every employee is constantly developing, ideas are flowing, and the motivation stays high.

In the end, Greenhouse confirmed what I already thought, working in task forces is much more effective than lineair working. Because, people tend to stimulate and encourage each other when working closely together. Working like this is more personal, which means that the employees are more open minded and eager to say what they have on their mind.

What also helps, is that Greenhouse has everyexpertise in-house. If they need anything, a piece of code, ads campaigns or copywriting. They just ask a colleague.