How GRDF activates its 12,000 employees and ecosystem to boost performance
With Ki-oZ, GRDF turns its innovation management platform into a thriving ecosystem whereemployees, experts, and startups co-create high-value projects.
With Ki-oZ, GRDF turns its innovation management platform into a thriving ecosystem whereemployees, experts, and startups co-create high-value projects.
As France’s leading natural gas distributor, GRDF operates in a context defined by energy transition, declining gas consumption, stricter regulatory expectations, and accelerating technological change.
To remain competitive, the company needed to:
Despite strong intent, employee ideas often remained invisible or disconnected from the right experts, sponsors, or business units. The company also needed a structured way to manage startup collaborations and consolidate its innovation portfolio.
GRDF’s ambition was clear: boost performance and accelerate the energy transition to prepare the future. To get there, the Group needed a model that could mobilize 12,000 employees, identify high-value ideas, and structure a portfolio with measurable impact.
To meet this ambition, GRDF created the Ki-oZ innovation program, enabling continuous ideation, thematic challenges, and collaboration across regions. At the same time, the company sought to deepen its startup engagement through more efficient and transparent calls for projects.
In 2022, GRDF partnered with Yumana to scale Ki-oZ with a robust innovation management software. Yumana migrated existing data, harmonized national workflows, and equipped GRDF with end-to-end capabilities including engagement, evaluation, team building, implementation, and external partnerships.
Since the launch of Ki-oZ, and particularly with Yumana scaling the program, GRDF has built one of the most active internal and external innovation communities in the French utility sector.
“Our mission as Open Innovation facilitators is to detect good ideas that our colleagues have difficulty bringing to the table on their own… With Yumana, we can direct them toward the right skills, the right sponsors and the best ambassadors.”
Philippe Metais
Strategy, Research & Development
and Innovation
GRDF
A structured, end-to-end process fosters engagement, transparency, and high-quality project maturation:
Ideation & ContributionEvaluation & Voting Team Building Content & Acculturation Implementation & Monitoring Open Innovation Pipeline Yumana’s platform provided the capabilities GRDF needed to scale, govern, and operationalize innovation with impact:
Helps teams design recurring, structured, and engaging programs.
Boost employee participation through visibility, recognition, and community support.
Automatically groups similar ideas to speed evaluation and eliminate duplicates, essential when managing large volumes.
Enable multidisciplinary collaboration and accelerate project maturation.
Dedicated workflows for startup scouting, evaluation, and collaboration.
Offer unified visibility on maturity, impact, and implementation progress.
The Ki-oZ program owes its success to a few essential drivers:
Local ownership accelerates adoption and increases participation.
Regular innovation challenges maintain momentum and visibility.
Clear workflows reduce friction from idea to deployment.
SSO, intuitive UX, and ready-to-use tools drive daily usage.
One unified environment for employees and startups strengthens ecosystem collaboration.
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