Brightwave selected for Unilever Open Innovation e-Learning

Creating global awareness in research and development

Brightwave, the workplace communication, learning and performance specialist has been commissioned by Unilever, one of the world's leading consumer goods companies, to create two new e-learning programmes for its global research and development employees focusing on Open Innovation and Awareness.

Charles Gould, Brightwave's Managing Director said, "We are really pleased to be doing this work for Unilever's global Research and Development Academy. We believe that e-learning is the way forward for organisations of this scale and distribution to convey subject and product knowledge in an effective and efficient manner. Some organisations are sceptical about conveying global messages via e-learning but here we are showing that as long you take some time out to consider the audience and the messages, it really can be an effective tool."

The initial course, Open Innovation Awareness, aims to get employees thinking about open innovation in a different way, explaining the need for change, providing distinctions between open and closed innovation in a Unilever context. The awareness programme is a pre-cursor to the Foundation module which is a more advanced look on how employees can put it into practice more consistently.

"At Unilever, we want to develop our collaboration with the best minds in the industry to make the difference that no single company could make on its own." explains David Bird, R&D Academy Learning Manager at Unilever. "In order to develop our plans for open innovation further, we need to drive deeper understanding of the subject amongst our global employee population. Through Brightwave, we are able to deliver an online solution removing the constraints of classroom based learning which can have implications on training of this scale. As an organisation, Unilever is committed to offering learning opportunities to our employees around the globe throughout their careers. Distance learning approaches represent a key pillar in our strategy to deliver training where and when it's needed."

As the programmes are going to be rolled out internationally through Unilever's R&D Academy, the e-learning has been designed to meet the needs of a global audience who vary in roles and experience. The look and feel of the course has been designed to meet the needs of the target audience who are well educated and mostly graduates, but not necessarily native English speakers.

The learning is to be delivered via Unilever's intranet, at a learner's workstation to remove issues such as travel. The courses, which both have mandatory assessments, will be tracked using Unilever's Learning Management System.