The newly formed Group Strategy team around Zee-Won (right) met in Berlin in January to grow even closer and work together.
Roadmap to GST2
A trifecta acting in concert
KWS needs a holistic strategy to achieve the long-term goals independence, profitable growth, sustainability, and innovation. To enable and drive an end-to-end strategy process, the Group Strategy function and its Leadership Team have been re-formed.
Vision & Mission, SP31, Business Unit strategies: It is sometimes a challenge in our day-to-day work to grasp the many components of our overall strategy. In order to reach our long-term company objectives, we regularly need to take a critical look at it. When Zee-Won Sur joined KWS last year as Head of Group Strategy, he and his team therefore began a new process to adapt and streamline our strategy and reassign tasks. The upshot is the current pivot in the Group Strategy Leadership Team – an initial impetus to get the ball rolling.
“It’s important for us to follow what we call the Strategy Life Cycle,” explains Zee-Won. “This means identifying the main trends that influence our future business and planning the critical activities that secure and increase value for our company and subsequently prioritizing innovative ideas and ultimately implementing them.” An in-depth analysis over the past months has revealed that there is a lot of potential in our organization that we are not fully leveraging yet: In the past, relevant capabilities were often spread across different departments. Thus, so far there has been a lack of a consistent structure, clear accountabilities and responsibilities, and optimal collaboration.
The Strategy Life Cycle comprises three steps: first, strategic preparation, second, planning and prioritization and third, implementation. Some departments are transitioning to Group Strategy (GST) as part of a new holistic approach.
“We’re creating an enormous opportunity by pooling our resources and capabilities.”
Nicolás Wielandt
Three steps: preparation, planning, implementation
At the start of the end-to-end strategy process, the Scouting & Licensing Team (formerly R&D Innovation and Licensing) will assume responsibility for scouting activities across the company. Together with the Strategic Planning team, it will identify key trends, define focus areas for growth, and enable long-term planning. In addition, the Scouting & Licensing team will search for external ideas and potential solutions to close internal technology gaps and tap new business opportunities.
In a second step, the Strategic Planning team will drive the strategic and long-term planning across business areas and, together with the Innovation Management team (formerly Digital Innovation Accelerator), evaluate and prioritize innovative ideas. While Innovation Management was previously focused mainly on digital innovation, it has now expanded its scope and deals with new business ideas holistically (more in the article “The team for inspiring ideas“). Furthermore, the Strategic Planning and Strategic Capability Programs teams jointly coordinate the prioritization of the greatest internal improvement potentials that need to be addressed to enable us to achieve our future business goals.
They worked together on a new approach and took up questions and ideas from the team.
The third element of the Strategy Life Cycle is to implement the strategy in various ways: The Value Offer Development team (formerly New Business Ventures) will take up the prioritized ideas out of our innovation process and develop concrete solutions with a focus on cross-crop and customer-centric offerings. The Strategic Commercial Programs team (formerly Strategic Project Management) and the Strategic Capability Programs team (formerly Process Excellence Team) will coordinate and drive organization-wide projects defining and implementing critically important go-to-market (e.g. customer centricity) as well as capability programs (e.g. internal end-to-end processes) respectively. Finally, the New Business Models team will establish a permanent home for future transformational innovation activities, and for the time being continue their efforts in Nutritional Food Ingredients (protein-containing plants for alternative foods). Together with Zee-Won, the team leads form the new Group Strategy Leadership Team.
“It is important to note that this is only the first step,” says Zee-Won. “We are currently detailing out our approach and will make necessary adjustments to reach our target state over the next months, while we’re continuing to deliver on all out tasks at hand.”
How will we know that this re-formation was successful? “Our ambition GST2 = Growth, Success, and Teamwork at GST means that we consider ourselves successful if, and only if, we have achieved a combination of supporting and guiding every team member on their journey of individual growth, as well as created tangible positive business impact through working jointly as a team, within GST and with all our partners in Business Units, R&D, and Group and Global Functions.” Like all coming together to play a concert to the melody called strategy.
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The three steps of the Strategy Life Cycle
To create a strong connection across all steps of the Strategy Life Cycle, all teams work closely together to put the trifecta into action. |
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