Productos Cementeros Mexicanos (PCM) is a new company competing in a very established industry with the biggest concrete companies in the world. To develop a strategic foothold in this competitive context, PCM approached IDEO to help understand the opportunities for innovation in the concrete industry - specifically, the potential for creating and testing new products and services - and to begin defining an infrastructure that would afford PCM a culture of continuous innovation.

IDEO began the engagement with an innovation process workshop to share IDEO's approach and work with PCM to identify initial opportunity areas. With the remainder of the project run almost entirely in Mexico, IDEO and PCM observed a variety of local concrete use situations and stakeholders, including employees at corporate and operational levels, clients, construction managers, foremen, and architects. These observations led IDEO and PCM to uncover the critical insight that PCM could best differentiate itself by uniquely and credibly defining its service offering.

From IDEO and PCM's fieldwork and synthesis they identified nineteen themes, which were distilled into six customer-facing innovation platforms. From these platforms IDEO and PCM began prototyping service concepts, two of which have been piloted for further development.

The team also developed frameworks that describe how PCM can build and sustain their own culture of innovation. In addition, a subsequent project followed this work in which IDEO guided PCM through a longer and more independent development process, structured around IDEO's own approach. As a result, PCM has started to implement and take ownership of the human-centered innovation techniques that were learned during this engagement.

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