Driving Customer-Focused Innovation: Elm and Successful Innovation in Public Enterprises

Set in Saudi Arabia's digital transformation context, this case follows Basem Jaffal and Elm's Growth-X team as they build a customer-journey-based innovation process within a successful public enterprise. Across three bootcamp cycles, Growth-X helps mature platforms and client-owned public projects uncover growth opportunities, but also exposes the limits of authority, mentor fit, client governance, and post-bootcamp follow-through. Basem must decide how to scale the method without turning it into a bureaucratic routine or weakening the customer evidence that made it effective.

This case enables participants to analyze how customer journeys can challenge product-centric assumptions; evaluate innovation governance in public enterprises; compare alternatives for scaling an internal innovation method; assess trade-offs between quality, reach, implementation control, and client involvement; and apply frameworks from customer-focused innovation, intrapreneurship, service design, and organizational change.